


Living Conditions

by TheWhiteLily



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Author's Favourite, BAMF John, Banter, Breathplay, Conditioning, Flashbacks, Forced Consent, Happy Ending, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Intellectual warefare, John is a Good Friend, John is a Very Good Doctor, M/M, Miscommunication, Moriarty Is A Dick, Patient John, Pining, Plot, Plot Twists, Post-Reichenbach, Psychological Torture, Psychology, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock Being an Idiot, Sherlock is spectacularly ignorant, Sherlock's Mind Palace, Slow Burn Romance, Stockholm Syndrome, There's Always Something, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unreliable Narrator, Virgin Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-04-24 06:55:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4909624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Reichenbach, Sherlock disappears completely.  Even Mycroft has given up hope of finding him alive... but Moriarty had planned for the events on the rooftop and has been taking full advantage of his new live in one.  </p><p>Sherlock isn't traumatised. He's <i>not</i>, no matter what John thinks, or at least he won't be once he fixes the damage to his mind palace enough to deal with Moriarty's legacy. Because he's always had something that Moriarty underestimated - but it might not be quite what Sherlock thinks it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Taking Out

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is explicit to be safe, but I wouldn't describe it so much as graphic, more... intense. _Very_ intense. This story contains sexual violence, non-consensual sex, slash, abusive relationships, and references to torture.
> 
> I love genius. But what I love even more is pushing it right up to its breaking point and watching it dance on the edge. Hmmm, no wonder I’ve been finding Moriarty so easy to write.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty is taken out, Sherlock is taken out of his hands, and John takes out anyone in his way.

[ ](https://sites.google.com/site/thewhitelily/Banner%208.png)

Aside from a chance meeting with Mike Stamford and the subsequent whirlwind that lead to his moving into 221B Baker St, joining MI5 was the best thing that had ever happened to John Watson.

After Sherlock had—

Well, after Sherlock, John had quickly fallen into an even blacker depression than had gripped him after his equally abrupt and final discharge from the military and his career as a surgeon, before a mad, obnoxious genius had ever given him back a purpose to his life. His leg was more painful than ever, and the certain knowledge that the damn thing was all in his head did absolutely nothing to help. His left hand trembled so badly that he’d taken to keeping the burn salve next to the teapot.

Perhaps he’d hit rock bottom three weeks after the funeral. He’d woken up slumped over the coffee table, unwashed and unshaven for five days, after having passed out with a nearly-empty bottle of whiskey in one hand and the Browning he’d once used to save Sherlock’s too-short life in the other. Perhaps, given another week, John Watson would have become nothing more than a statistic on military invalid discharge suicides. That was, if he hadn’t opened bleary eyes to find Mycroft Holmes sitting in the chair opposite him, calmly holding out a hand in mute request.

After a long moment in which his hung-over mind debated whether the other man wanted the gun or the whiskey, and whether he was willing to give him either, John placed the Browning down on the table between them with a click.

“My brother’s death was a tragic waste,” Mycroft said in response, “and in it, I bear no small responsibility. I do not wish for my mistakes to claim further victims.”

It shouldn’t have surprised John anymore how anyone by the name of Holmes could ignore the usual pleasantries that might lead into such bald statements—or the emotions that they may have provoked—with the same disregard as they could ignore the conventions such as locks and privacy. For a brief moment the painful familiarity in his chest drowned out the throbbing of his head.

John had wondered, briefly, if Mycroft had known why Sherlock jumped. John hadn’t spoken to him since before Sherlock’s death, but no one else who _knew_ Sherlock had been able to work out _why_. The press were very sure it was due to the revelation of his disgrace. Moriarty had rested on his laurels as Richard Brook and quietly retired into obscurity, claiming that he refused to take any of the flush of ‘unearned’ acting roles that had come his way based on his notoriety. Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and Molly—although she had been too distressed to talk long, wearing the heartbreak of losing him on her sleeve rather than buried deep in her heart like John—were all certain that Sherlock could not have cared in the slightest what the general public thought of him.

But whether Mycroft knew his reasons or not, there was no point in asking. John was sure he wouldn’t tell anyone. It didn’t matter, anyway. It was done. Sherlock was gone, and even working out why it had happened could never bring him back.

“With Sherlock out of the way,” said Mycroft, “you cannot doubt that Moriarty will realise mastery over the whole of the criminal element. Britain stands on the brink of a crime wave the likes of which the world has never seen. No one can ever fill Sherlock’s role, but I have pledged to do my best to carry on the fight he held dear. Will you do less, John Watson? Or will you answer your country’s call?”

John tried to reply, but only managed a croak. He cleared his throat, realising that he hadn’t spoken in days. He tried again. “What?”

Mycroft blinked patiently. “There is an opening in an MI5 SWAT team for a second in command. A medical officer who can double as an additional sharpshooter would serve as a great asset for the team. Her Majesty’s Government requests you take the position.”

 _He_ is _the British Government_ , Sherlock’s words rang in John’s head. Apparently he hadn’t been kidding. “Look, if this is because you feel guilty about Sherlock—”

“Dr. Watson, you are a gifted doctor, an exceptional shot, unflinching under pressure and stunningly ruthless when innocents are threatened. Minor physical infirmities will in no way limit your ability to perform in the role I have available. I did not wish to poach you from my brother’s side; your ability to work with him was invaluable and frankly unprecedented. Only the knowledge that you served better there has delayed my approach for so long. The sight of you attempting to recapture the feeling of danger by drunkenly sleeping with an unloaded gun—don’t try to deny it, you would never have allowed a loaded weapon to leave your person—suggests that the time to act is now.”

“I... I can’t.” John looked across the room at his cane which, at some point in the previous night’s drinking, he’d thrown at the mocking smiley face on the wall in frustration. Damn. He wanted to get up and make himself some tea, maybe get some aspirin, but he wasn’t going to crawl across the room for his cane in front of Mycroft. Carefully, he set the whiskey bottle on the table beside the gun. “You know it’s not just the physical wound that got me invalided out. I’m unreliable.”

“And I said you should fire your therapist eighteen months ago, Dr. Watson. My department’s psychological assessments are necessarily less narrow, and substantially more focussed on performance under pressure.” Mycroft rose and walked to the door, turning briefly before he left. “A car will be here for you at eight am. Do try to be marginally clean and sober to meet your new teammates.”

And that, apparently, was that.

John had initially worried that the other members of his team might resent his presence as having skipped the usual promotion ladder, but he’d discovered his fears to be unwarranted. It seemed that Mycroft’s recruitment net passed over rank and ignored previous occupation, focussing solely on talent. Captain Watson of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers had actually turned out to be the highest ranked military officer their team sported; Parker, their best markswoman, had only been a lance corporal.  Several had never served in the armed forces at all. Stumpy Gregson, their entry specialist and the team leader, had been at a parole hearing when a stranger with an umbrella turned up to speak on his behalf and offer him a job.

The eclectic crew had been mildly amused, if a little dubious, at the way John’s limp and the tremor that had put paid to his surgical career appeared to come and go according to his mood during their team-building and retraining exercises. That had all changed the day of their first real mission.

Their intelligence on the situation had turned out to be bad and their explosives engineer went down to a lead pipe in the throat from a desperate drug dealer. John had beaten the team’s assigned snipers to the punch with a shot that took out the shoulder of the man before he could take a second swing. He ran two flights of stairs with no sign of a limp and leaped a six foot gap between catwalks to reach the wounded man, then smoothly performed an emergency tracheotomy to stabilise him until the ambulance arrived. The glances of mild concern John had been receiving transformed into a level of respect that verged on awe.

John’s tea in the break room always needed an inch of space at the top, and on a boring day he could barely hit the target in the gallery, but his role only required a steady hand in an emergency. John Watson wasn’t the man you asked to collect the latest round from the bar if you wanted more than two thirds of your pint remaining by the time it reached you, but that didn’t matter because John hadn’t been allowed to buy the drinks that day or very many since.

Today was the eleventh mission he’d run with this team. They had been called that morning to strategise springing a honey-trap aimed at a minor government official—or The British Government himself, depending on who you believed—storming an old underground station he’d been tipped to contain a terrorist cell. They’d been told it was highly likely to be a double-cross, but could provide valuable intelligence nonetheless.

Mycroft had, uncharacteristically, worked with them on the plan of attack all morning, accompanying them to the site. Preparations seemed to be going well enough. In the hour they had been on onsite, they’d blocked the tunnels on either side of the abandoned station, disabled three types of nasty explosives that booby-trapped the building and John and Stumpy were cross-referencing the infra-red scan of the ancient underground terminal with the building plans to determine the final approach.

Then John looked up to see Mycroft. Not standing and watching as he occasionally did, waiting to provide an observation that would change the face of the situation, but strapping on a bullet-proof vest. John had never been on a mission where the man had come along before. He’d never, in fact, seen Mycroft doing anything more strenuous than paperwork. His presence here at all was unprecedented.

John stood, exchanged a brief word with Stumpy, and walked over to Mycroft

“What’s going on, Mycroft?” he asked quietly.

“I will be accompanying you when you breach the building,” returned Mycroft.

“I don’t think so,” said John. “The building was booby-trapped with explosives. We’ve disabled the ones we’ve found, but there may be more that we can’t access until we’re inside. Britain can’t afford to lose its government if we end up in pieces,” he joked carefully.

“I’ll take the risk,” said Mycroft without looking up.

“Sir,” said John formally, settling automatically into parade rest, “if there is any information you are withholding, I suggest that you notify me now, or I will be recommending that this mission be rescheduled to another time after more reconnaissance.”

Mycroft raised his eyebrows and stared for a long moment, but evidently saw that John would not be moved. “I suspect the direct involvement of an old friend of ours,” he said.

“Moriarty.”

“Precisely. The honey-trap was aimed at me. At a… weakness of mine. Your team’s role is to keep me as safe as possible—I highly doubt the man himself will be there—but I must be or we won’t find out his game.”

John closed his eyes for a minute, horrified at the thought of the elder Holmes falling into the same trap as his brother. “Mycroft,” he said, “Moriarty doesn’t play...”

“Oh, I don’t intend to play games with him, Dr. Watson. If he expects me to fence with him, he’ll be much mistaken. I intend to finish him.”

“Good. Good. Do you think,” asked John slowly, then stopped and started again. “Look, he kept saying, on the phone, that it was a magic trick, that he was a fake. At the time, I thought he meant—you know—what everyone else meant. But he wasn’t everyone else, was he? I can’t get it out of my mind. Is there any chance, any at all, that…”

“None,” said Mycroft, his face a picture of blank calm.

“He _could_ have faked it, though, couldn’t he? You told me once that he could have fooled you.”

Mycroft nodded slowly. “With the death that he chose, I considered three likely ways that Sherlock could have orchestrated an illusion without my knowledge, and several good reasons he might have done so. All of them seem more likely than the press’s characterisation of guilt-stricken despair at his disgrace. If he felt that it was his best option, given my brother’s capacity for unthinking cruelty, I do not doubt that he would have faked his death without hesitation and entirely without counting the human cost of the deception to those he left behind.”

“So… he might be alive?”

“No, John. I am telling you that he could have falsified his death. He could not have falsified his _life_. If Sherlock survived, he would not retire into obscurity even if he were capable of such a thing. He would use the freedom of death to tear apart Moriarty’s web of deception unhindered and unexpected. There would be signs of activity, even if he were maintaining deep cover. Anonymous tips, vigilante activity, rumours, whispers so faint the public would not recognise them, but I? I who knew him? I who equalled and—with all due modesty—surpassed him in his gift for perception? I could not miss them. If Sherlock ever did fake his death, then he did not last long afterwards. I am very sorry, John, but there is no question. Sherlock is dead.”

John bowed his head, feeling a faint, unrecognised flicker of hope die inside. “And we’re here for…”

“For Moriarty, John,” said Mycroft, blandly. “So Sherlock can finally rest.”

John realised he’d forgotten his cane over next to Stumpy, but he didn’t need it despite the heavy feeling in his chest. Back at the table he broke the news that they would have a VIP along for the ride, to general eye-rolls, but Mycroft had garnered enough respect with the team that no one fought the decision. John also asked Hsu to make another round looking for a second level of explosives, hidden more cleverly than the first. And set Parker and Smith to working out the sightlines inside the building, to make sure the perch they chose gave them a line on anywhere a sniper might set up camp.

Stumpy raised his eyebrows at John, but didn’t object.

***

They went in with a flashbang. It was standard procedure, but John still hadn’t got over the fact that it was… well, it was cool, in a way that got his adrenaline pumping and made his hands rock-steady.

Apparently they hadn’t been expected, because they caught the security in the vaulted top level of the station unawares, overwhelmed them immediately, and within five minutes the twelve men were cuffed and being removed from the scene.

 _The rest are rats in a trap_ , came Griggs’ voice over the comms. _I can see them milling around down there; they haven’t got any way out but the doors we own._

They regrouped and reset, taking out the security cameras, sweeping the inside of the building for explosives, but at this point they held the bottleneck. Once they’d consolidated their position, they could flush the rooms below at their leisure.

 _Hang on,_ called Griggs, interrupting a planning session. _There’s two coming up the stairs now._

“Nobody shoot,” called a mild Irish voice from behind the door to the sub-level, making John send Mycroft a meaningful glance the other man didn’t appear to notice. “I’m coming out with a hostage.”

 _Fan out, everyone_. Stumpy’s voice was so quiet John only heard him over the comm link even though he was standing right beside him. _Cover them, treat both with suspicion until proven otherwise. Keep a line on the door, we don’t need more backup arriving._

The hall behind the doorway seemed empty for a brief moment before two figures appeared. The shorter one held a gun to the neck of the other, pulling his hostage behind as he walked.

“Hallo, Ice Man,” said Moriarty cheerfully. “Soooo nice of you to remember to come visit! Sherly’s been missing you—haven’t you darling?”

Sher— John’s mind spun, Sherlock was... The hostage was Sherlock.

John had asked for a miracle, and Sherlock was _ali—_

Sherlock was hurt. In fact, Sherlock looked dreadful. He stumbled and wavered on his feet as Moriarty pulled him along by a handful of shirtfront, barely reminiscent of the tall, graceful figure who seemed to warp the landscape around him to fit under his stride. His usually lean frame was so thin that the bones stood out like razors, the hollows of his eyes sunken and his cheekbones looking like they could almost cut through the skin. His shirt had several bloodstains, stripes of bright red down the back of one side that looked like recent lash-marks. Through the thin shirt-fabric John could see mottled dark blue and greenish shadows in various states of healing.

The purple-black necklace of a hand-shaped bruise encircled his throat, completed by a vicious looking bite mark above the collarbone, partially scabbed over but bleeding into his shirt collar as though it had been recently torn open. There was blood, John realised, on Moriarty’s lips.

But the worst thing was Sherlock’s eyes themselves. If the eyes were the window to the soul, then Sherlock’s soul was not at home. His usually laser-sharp, penetrating gaze was dull and flat, drifting disinterestedly around the room, flinching away from the crowd of people.

Was it even Sherlock? Of course it was, but—it couldn’t be. Oh, God. What had Moriarty done to him?

John risked a glance over at Mycroft, who looked as cool as though he were strolling along the Thames. As cool as though the brother he had insisted was certainly dead not an hour before was regularly resurrected from the grave.

 _I want control of the mission,_ John murmured into his throat mike. _I’ve got history with these two; I know how they think._

 _Roger that_ , replied Stumpy without rancour. _Watson is one-eye-cee._

 _Target is James Moriarty,_ said John. _Intelligent and ruthless, favours snipers, explosives, and innocent hostages. He or the hostage are probably trapped, and he likes to move suddenly, so steady on the trigger and be ready for surprises._ _Hostage is a high value friendly. Do not risk his safety. Lethal force authorised, clear head shots only. Smith and Parker, there_ will _be snipers on standby; if you haven’t found their perch then keep looking. Stumpy and I can keep things covered down here while you remove the overwatch. Hsu, do your best to work around us and find any explosives we’ve missed: check, then triple check. Griggs, call in backup squad to set up snipers on likely exit routes, at least three blocks out. If we have to make a deal, I want to be able to put a bullet in Moriarty’s brain the moment he thinks he’s clear._

“Don’t you like my new name for Sherly, Ice Man?” Moriarty was demanding, with pout of disappointed hurt. “Boring, I know, but ‘The Virgin’ just wasn’t _working_ anymore. Then again,” he added slyly as John’s heart caught in his throat at the implication of the words, “‘The Ice Man’ isn’t exactly as accurate as you thought, either, is it?”

“Family feeling can be hard to predict,” said Mycroft blandly. “Brothers will hold a grudge over the silliest of things.”

 _We’ve found the nest_ , came Parker's smooth alto in John’s ear. _Nice catch, John; they were well hidden, but we’ve got them in our sights now. Will take them on your go._

“And YOU!” Moriarty whirled on John, pulling Sherlock forward another two steps, the gun still wedged tight into his neck. “Found another Holmes to play hanger-on to, have we? Not even a decent grieving period before the dog finds another master. Such disloyalty! Tut tut.”

John stared back stonily. “Parker and Smith,” he said, pitching his voice to carry to Moriarty but not much further, “take out the snipers.”

There was an echoing explosion of two sniper rifles discharging simultaneously in an enclosed space, but the instant of forewarning meant that Moriarty didn’t flinch on his trigger; Sherlock was still alive. John breathed in again.

 _Two kills confirmed_ , said Parker. _Shifting sights to primary target._

 _Smith, leave her there and circle round_. _Find another angle so he can’t hide behind the hostage._ “Release him, Moriarty,” John continued out loud. “We have you surrounded, and your snipers are down. Surrender now, and—”

“Oh my GOD, you’re so DULL!” screamed Moriarty, releasing the restraints on his barely contained rage for a scant moment before expertly reeling it back into a mask of sing-song sarcastic malice. “Release the hostage, you’re surrounded, blah blah, BLAH! Is that really in the training manual, or did you get it all from bad movies? Be _quiet_ , Johnny-boy, let the grown-ups talk.”

“I’m afraid I must agree with Dr. Watson,” said Mycroft. “You wouldn’t be out here if you had any option other than negotiation, and in that I believe you will find your position quite weak.”

“Negooociate,” drawled Moriarty like a recalcitrant schoolboy, then brightened. “Iiiiive got a better idea! If Sherly’s all you’re here for, then I don’t mind giving him back. I’ve had my fun; it’s _dull_ playing with dolls when they don’t even struggle anymore.”

Moriarty thrust the gun more firmly under Sherlock’s chin, forcing the taller man up onto his toes as he ran a hand obscenely down Sherlock’s chest and took an intimately painful grip on his crotch. Sherlock didn’t flinch, didn’t even change his pattern of breathing, just placidly permitted the contact as though it were none of his business. Moriarty gave up, sharing a disgusted look with the supporting ranks of the SWAT team as though he imagined everyone must empathize with his frustration.

“Oh well,” Moriarty shrugged, sing-song again, “there’s always a drawback to being too good at what you do. Sherly, my dear, light of my life, what would you for Daddy?”

“Anything,” replied Sherlock with a breathy catch in his voice that could have been from disuse or the gun pressing into his throat, but sounded...

Jesus, thought John. Jesus H. Christ, it keeps getting worse.

“I know you would, lovely, I know you would. Now, if anyone makes a threatening move towards me...” Moriarty paused to stroke Sherlock’s cheek tenderly, and rose on tiptoe to lay a kiss on his jaw next to the tip of the gun. “... if anyone discharges a weapon, or tries to follow me when I leave… If anyone tries to harm me…”

He grasped Sherlock’s throat in a bruising grip, fingers digging into flesh as he pulled the taller man downwards and kissed him again, this time savagely on the mouth, and Sherlock returned it with enthusiasm, animated for the first time John had seen. Moriarty’s gun never shifted from its deadly threat at Sherlock’s throat. When he was released, Sherlock stayed bowed over as he’d been positioned, like a ragdoll, until Moriarty gave him a shove that sent him stumbling away.

“... then I’d like you to shoot yourself,” finished Moriarty with a satisfied smirk.

John had barely caught his breath at the realisation that Moriarty seemed to have somehow passed Sherlock a second gun under the cover of the kiss, before Sherlock removed the safety and pressed the gun up under his own chin.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said fervently, his countenance flooded with a heart-breaking relief that made John stagger. _No!_ He couldn’t watch Sherlock commit suicide again. Not _again_.

“Uh-uh-uh!” scolded Moriarty, shifting his gun lightning-fast to aim directly between John’s eyes. “Not yet, precious. Not until after I’m safely away. You know how important it is to protect Daddy, don’t you?”

Sherlock’s face fell a little, but he stayed in position, his wasted arms trembling with the effort of restraint.

“He won’t do it,” interrupted Mycroft. John didn’t know how the man could talk without screaming. “You can’t condition someone to commit suicide. The brain won’t allow it.”

“He will,” Moriarty disagreed with a delighted smirk. “Last time we played this game, I’d given him a dummy bullet. Poor Sherly looked so _disappointed_ when he realised he was still alive, I just had to fuck him again to cheer him up!”

Mycroft showed no reaction that John could see, but Moriarty seemed satisfied he’d scored a hit.

“I’ve had your dear brother for eight months, Ice Man. You know I didn’t _really_ need you to give me anything on Sherly here to orchestrate that fiasco in the papers. Any details I couldn’t find out another way couldn’t be disproved for that ridiculous story the public lapped up anyway. But the guilt, oh, the guilt! It was delicious. _More_ than worth the beatings your boys gave me trying to get me to talk without it. Especially when I knew I could revisit it all on your darling baby brother later. And thanks to you, I knew every vulnerability, every weak spot, every road into that pretty little brain of his. You have no idea what I’ve done to him. _No idea._ ”

“That’s why you’ve aimed your weapon at Dr. Watson, is it?” Mycroft asked coolly. “Because you control Sherlock utterly?”

“He may be a little over-eager to please me at times,” demurred Moriarty. “If you doubt me, _Ice Man_ , you’re welcome to shoot me and prove it. No? DULL! At least your weakness is someone worthwhile. Plain ordinary John is just disgustingly dull. Yeugch. You can see why I _had_ to rescue Sherly-darling; it was embarrassing the way he was letting me lead him around by the heart...” Moriarty trailed off mournfully, then he switched again and his gaze fixed fully onto John once more, eyes narrow with hatred. “Lower your weapon, Johnny-boy. Now. It _offends_ me that you would dare to threaten me.”

 _Steady everyone,_ murmured John, changing the angle on his own gun to point at the floor at Moriarty’s feet. The rest of the team still had him in their sights and John had a feeling it wasn’t worth testing Moriarty’s sanity on this point.

“I’m tempted to shoot anyway, just to finally rid him of the nasty mongrel,” Moriarty mused. “Really, it would be a kindness to both of you…”

John breathed evenly for a long moment of silence; then Moriarty’s face cycled again into hyperactive glee.

“Still, I promised Sherly you’d _burn_ , not bleed, so we’d better save it for another time.” _Call me!_ he mouthed at John, making a telephone at his ear with his fingers, and looked back to Mycroft.

“Take your brother,” he shrugged. “Call him a gift, for impressing me—keeping faith in him all this time, with no evidence? How…” he sneered a little, “ _emotional_. I honestly didn’t think you had it in you. And maybe once I’m safely away, the _pet_ will be able to convince Sherly to put the gun down. Or maybe not. Maybe you can fix him and then I can take him back and break him _again_! Or would that be dull?” he asked, flashing to seeming concern for a moment, before shrugging. “Oh well! In the meantime, we can go our separate ways. Hearts divided, but never far apart! Maybe I’ll work on melting down a nuclear reactor, or crashing the stock market—”

Unobserved, as he ranted at Mycroft, his aim had drifted a few precious inches to the side of John’s head and, while nothing in Sherlock’s suicidal posture changed, his eyes blazed back into life, locking with John’s and widening for a fraction of a second as the Plan crackled between them.

John’s heart swelled with unutterable relief; Sherlock was _still_ _in there_!

 _Ready for it..._ John murmured into his mike.

Then everything happened at once.

Sherlock began to shift his gun to point at Moriarty, but the other man seemed to realise his error instantly and fired past John’s ear even as he looked back to correct his aim—the first round in Sherlock’s gun was blank—but John was already diving as he screamed, ”FIRE!”, so Moriarty’s second round missed, too. He never had a chance to fire a third: Sherlock’s second and third rounds sank into the side of Moriarty’s face with what John was unashamed to think of as a satisfying spray of gore, even as the rest of the team caught up with the opportunity and let loose a veritable hail of bullets. The man was dead ten times over before he began to fall.

Sherlock dropped his gun instantly, spreading his fingers above his head even before barrage stopped and nervous laser dots began to converge on him.

“LEAVE HIM!” roared John. “Friendly, hostage is friendly! Hsu, check them both for traps. Everyone else, secure the surrounds.”

Sherlock hadn’t even waited for dots to wink out, let alone to be cleared for explosives. He walked around beside Moriarty’s very dead body and rolled it over with a solid kick, so that the man’s one remaining eye stared up at the ceiling, what was left of his face frozen in eerily pleased looking surprise.

Sherlock crouched, barefoot and heedless of the quickly spreading blood, to unnecessarily check the pulse at Moriarty’s neck. “You were right,” he told the dead man. “I will cherish that.”

Then he collapsed.

John rushed forward and dragged Sherlock out of the pool of Moriarty’s blood before pausing to retrieve the gloves and foil shock blanket he carried in a pocket on his vest. _Stumpy_ , he told his microphone, _you’re back in control; I’ve got a patient. Watson out._

 _Roger, Watson_ , said Stumpy. _Good work. All right, Griggs, where are we at on the infra-red? Once this room’s secure, we’ll reset to flush the lower—_

John filtered out the chatter, focussing on the job in front of him, snapping on gloves as he drank in the sight of Sherlock—unconscious, somewhat the worse for the wear, but _alive_. Back from the dead. And Moriarty? Moriarty was really dead. It was all over, bar the mopping up. And, John smirked to himself, sneaking a look at the still-growing pool of blood under Moriarty’s body, he was going to need a _lot_ of mopping up.

“An ambulance is on the way,” came a cool voice behind his shoulder.

John switched off his mike; the team didn’t need to hear this. “Griggs knows to call for one if I’m busy,” he agreed mildly, tucking the crinkling blanket over Sherlock’s legs while he checked over his head and torso for critical injuries and Hsu checked for wires or devices.

Mycroft obviously knew John’s manner well enough to hear the repressed rage in his tone. “I didn’t know,” he said. “The message I received was signed SH—referenced a childhood incident as proof of identity—but I truly believed it was a trap baited with false hope. Either way we traced the phone that sent the text to here and set up the operation immediately.”

“You though it was a good enough chance to come along yourself.”

“I’m a sentimental fool,” agreed Mycroft without expression. “Dr. Hooper did seem thoroughly grief-stricken at Sherlock’s death. As did you.”

“Sherlock was very convincing,” said John shortly, resting back onto his heels with a sigh as he finished the check. Hsu gave him a nod, wisely choosing not to interrupt the discussion, and John rearranged the blanket to cover his friend completely again.

“He always is. Will he be alright?”

“He’s just fainted. Dehydration, malnutrition and shock, mostly, I think. I'm sure his wounds are painful, but they’re not life threatening and they're surprisingly clean. He’ll need a proper assessment in hospital to make sure I haven’t missed anything more subtle, a psych evaluation, blood tests, and at least a twenty-four hour stay for observation, but he should be fine.”

Mycroft hummed noncommittally. “In the meantime, you may consider yourself on indefinite paid leave. It appears that your primary assignment has been reinstated.”

With that he strolled away, swinging his umbrella as though he’d simply been for a walk in the park.


	2. Healing Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty acts as nurse, Sherlock wakes up again, and John holds his hand.

_Sherlock hissed faintly, edging towards consciousness as the sting of antiseptic pierced his half-conscious stupor. “Jhn?” he asked muzzily._

_No, that wasn’t right. Despite the gentle hands daubing the cool liquid into the network of fine cuts on his chest, the bonds cutting into his wrists and ankles clearly marked him as a captive. The torturers had efficiently stripped him and worked him over completely, but very carefully, without ever telling him why._

_It had been somewhere in the realm of three days before he’d finally passed out from shock and blood loss. He was bruised down to the bone, cuts and burns and abrasions stung his skin all over, his muscles ached, and his head spun with a dizzy confusion that made him doubtful he could stand upright, even if he hadn’t been tied, let alone make any kind of successful escape attempt._

_But there had been no serious injuries. Nothing permanently debilitating or that would require surgical treatment. Observation: his captors, whomever they were, wanted him alive, and relatively intact._

_“Close, but no cigar.” Moriarty’s dark chuckle doubled his sense of dislocation and instinctively his eyes snapped open to observe as much as he could; a windowless concrete room, a raised hospital bed beneath him, his unanticipated nurse/captor bending over his naked, immobilised body..._

_Sherlock stared stupidly. The man looked just as at home gently cleaning Sherlock’s wounds as he had done as Jim from IT, but there was a glimpse of the glittering psychopath there, visible at the back of his eyes and in the curl of his mouth._

_“You’re not dead,” said Sherlock, the words sounding thick on dry lips. Subtly, he tested his bonds—cable ties, cheap and efficient—but they were tight and expertly positioned: ankles and knees; little fingers, wrists and forearms behind his back. He wouldn’t be able to get the leverage to even start working them free._

_“Neither are you,” agreed Moriarty. “Fake suicides seem to be in style right now. Honestly, you didn’t even take my pulse. I was disappointed in you. Here, this’ll help.” He shifted, sat on the bed beside Sherlock’s shoulder and then lifted the bound man, cradling Sherlock’s head against his chest with one arm to press a cup of water to his lips._

_Sherlock had slowly and very awkwardly drunk almost half of it before it occurred to him to wonder if it was drugged, which only went to show that he was most likely already drugged._

_“I’m not going to drug you.” Moriarty’s voice was sing-song with the tedium of explaining the obvious. “It would make things far too easy. Drink it all; dehydration’s making you boor-ring.”_

_Sherlock drank, conscious that he had little choice; he needed water. Besides, if Moriarty wanted him drugged, he could simply put a needle in his arm. It wasn’t like Sherlock would be able to stop him. Despite his thirst, he was glad when the cup was finished and the other man extricated himself from the unnecessarily close contact, gently lowering Sherlock back onto his side. He lay still, letting Moriarty resume the slow process of sponging dirt and grime out of the cuts his men had made..._

_Sherlock’s gaze narrowed on the man beside him._

_“Ah, there you are,” smirked Moriarty. “Hi, Sexy. I missed you—did you miss me?”_

_“Why?”_

_“Awwww, tell me you were at least a teensy bit sad to think I was dead...”_

_“Not in the slightest,” said Sherlock shortly. “Why? It was all very elegant I’m sure, and now I’m your prisoner you can hurt me or heal me and I can’t do a thing to stop you, but that really does sound deadly dull._ Why? _”_

_“I did tell you I was thinking of getting a live in pet, didn’t I? Did you think I’d be content with someone as ordinary as plain old Johnny-boy? I don’t know how you stand the monotony, I really don’t.”_

_“I’m not sure I’d make a very good pet.”_

_“We’ll have to make some behavioural changes, of course.  Housebreaking and so on.” Moriarty ducked his chin and glanced up through his lashes in mock-shyness. “I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to it.”_

_Sherlock gave a hooded, weary blink. “I’ll admit I’m growing bored of our playdates. You should branch out. Find some other friends.”_

_“Last time, sweetheart, I promise. You don’t have much more in you to amuse me. You just handed your heart away like you were_ ordinary _, and it was fun to play with for a while, but really that was too easy. So I thought why don’t we play for your reputation? But you didn’t even realise it mattered until I’d already won. Boring! So I thought why not play a game for your life? Surely you’ll be a bit more attached to that? And that was a little more fun, but still predictable—asking sweet little Molly to sign you off and trusting your pet’s grief to sell the rest—really, so crushingly predictable. Now we’re going to play for your mind.”_

_“And let me guess, if I don’t work for you, you’ll have my friends killed. You really are a one-trick pony.”_

_“If it ain’t broke…” mused Moriarty. “But I think not. I’m bored with that ridiculously exploitable weakness. I think we’ll just keep this between the two of us. And my employees, of course.”_

_“So what if I don’t want to play?”_

_“Oh, you don’t get a choice, my dear. That’s the best part of your little stunt. We’re_ _alone at last.”_

_Sherlock hissed as the antiseptic burned in the first of several slightly deeper wheals on his ribs, and then frowned fractionally as Moriarty paused in his work and rubbed an unmarked patch on his side soothingly until the sting eased._

_“You would seem,” said Sherlock, carefully testing the apparent opening—was Moriarty seriously aiming to develop a_ captor bond _?—the idea was absurd, “to be aiming somewhat lower than my mind with the Florence Nightingale routine. Jim from IT wasn’t too big a stretch for your acting talents, then?”_

_“The virgin thinks it’s a weakness!” Moriarty laughed aloud._

_The soothing rub lingering in an affectionate caress for a brief moment more, making Sherlock suddenly very aware of his nakedness, before Moriarty resumed the only slightly more impersonal touch of disinfecting the deep whip cut, the flesh either side swollen and tender._

_“Irene was right: you really are unbearably innocent. No, I already have your body, and I can and will have it any time I want. But_ patience _, dearest. I want our first time together to be_ special _. There’s no rush. We’ve got the rest of your life together.”_

_Their eyes met and in a flash of clarity, Sherlock could see the moves stretching ahead of him, and knew that Moriarty could see it in him, too, revelling in the moment of realisation as Sherlock tried to calculate his way free only to find every exit blocked, every move predicted and countered._

_Molly was about to suffer a fatal accident, if she hadn’t already, and there would be a rash of deaths throughout his homeless network of those who had assisted or sheltered him. There was nothing he could do to stop it; without Sherlock to observe the details, no one would even suspect a connection between perhaps a tainted batch of drugs that claimed the life of a few homeless bums and the tragic death of a respected pathologist. (Seal it away; caring won’t help.) No one left alive would know that he wasn’t dead._

_Without evidence of Sherlock’s survival, Mycroft would ruthlessly dismiss his own uncertainty as wishful thinking clouding his objectivity, and even John wouldn’t hold on to the hope of a miracle for long. Moriarty had manipulated Sherlock himself into orchestrating the one fraud that would ensure that no one would ever look for him—not Mycroft, not John, not Lestrade, no one—and he was far too clever to allow Sherlock to escape without outside help. There would be no way out._

_Perhaps Sherlock would go down fighting; die of pain, hunger, dehydration and blood loss within the week. More likely, Moriarty would keep him alive despite his best efforts to resist, force feed him and provide the bare minimum of care to ensure he survived in the greatest discomfort possible, until he finally broke utterly and begged to be allowed to do anything, just to be put out of his misery._

_Perhaps he would cooperate, live as Moriarty’s treasured pet, turn his talents to devising perfect crimes and elegant atrocities, watching always for the avenue of escape that realistically, given how good it seemed Moriarty was at anticipating him, would never come._

_Perhaps he would walk the line in the centre, each concession rewarded with some new humiliation but no resolution apart from the slowly gathering tarnish on his soul, a game of stalemate playing on and on until Moriarty grew bored and finally killed him._

_Perhaps..._

_Sherlock locked the thought away before it could fully blossom and firmed his mind. There was really only one viable option._

_Moriarty saw the decision and smiled, dropping his gauze swab back into its bowl and standing._

_“The hard way, then,” he said, as though they’d been having the conversation aloud. “Be seeing you, my dear.”_

_He swept out and, barely had Moriarty’s silhouette cleared the doorframe, before three large men replaced him. Adrenaline surged as two stepped close to Sherlock, hauling him roughly to his feet. The third smiled grimly before swinging the door clos—_

Awake. John’s hand on his arm. Conclusion: Safe. No! Never safe! Action: suppress endorphin release. Result: unsuccessful.

Deduction: Nightmare. Action: seal memory for later analysis.

“Okay, it’s okay, you’re safe, you’re okay, you’re...”

John’s voice. Unexpected.

Query: another trick?

Observation: thought processes slowed. Drugged. Opiate.

Moriarty had promised no drugs, but perhaps he became bored. Query is plausible.

Observation: beeping. 132 beats per minute, but slowing. Heart rate monitor. His heart beat. Smell of disinfectant, plastic, adhesive. Deduction: apparently a hospital.

Consult memories: recent memory access denied. Data leading to current situation unavailable. Consult memories: geographical memory access denied. Last known location unavailable.

Observation: mind palace appears to have undertaken severe damage. Entrance hall... unrecognisable.  Main door breached. Containment lost.  

Hypothesis: Moriarty has found a way in. Proceed with caution.

Test hypothesis: examine hand holding his. Left hand. Short rounded fingers. Relatively un-calloused, dry skin: non-menial profession, frequent hand washing or use of alcohol sanitiser. Deduction: medical professional, doctor or nurse. Less likely, office worker suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. Dominant calluses: left handed. Handles handgun regularly, military hold. Rifle calluses less defined, perhaps weekly practice. Deduction: doctor in military or special forces. Observation: does not fit unlocked data for John’s hand. Deduction: hand does not belong to Moriarty. Query 2: Is the hand actually John’s? Result: Inconclusive, data unavailable.

Obvious conjecture: have been rescued. Observation: Moriarty is clever. Obvious means unlikely.

Hypothesis: this is a trick.  Moriarty has grown bored and begun a new game. Hypothetical conclusion: will need data to decide how to play.

Sub-hypothetical: Moriarty has John. Result: ... Result: ... Observation: appear to be experiencing an unhelpful emotional response to sub-hypothetical. Seal for later analysis. Result: unsuccessful. It could actually be John. It might _actually_...

Conclusion: more data required.

Retrieve locked data: John. Keyword: Heliocentric. Data found.

John. John. JohnjohnjohnjohnJOHN!

“—you’re safe now, it’s okay, you’re in the hos—”

John’s voice. John’s hand. John. _John._ “John.” Sherlock took a slow breath over the tightness in his throat. “Thank you, John, I am fully awake now.”

Sherlock opened his eyes. White square ceiling tiles. Two fire sprinklers on redundant circuits, a public address speaker, and a ceiling mounted television bracket showing signs of wear. Consistent with hypothesis of hospital, or something made up to look like one.

He turned his head to observe John, narrowing his eyes when he noticed the man was stressed, unshaven, hadn’t slept for at least thirty-six hours, and had recently shed tears. Things would be substantially more difficult if Moriarty had captured John, too. John wasn’t restrained, in pain, decorated by laser sight dots, or wearing a Semtex vest and earpiece; that was a good start, although by no means conclusive. He was meeting Sherlock’s eyes without any appearance of guilt, fear, or blank horror. The glow of relief in his eyes seemed genuine. Careful. _Careful._ Moriarty knows morphine acts like cotton wool in the brain, dulling perceptions and slowing conclusions. And he knows the rush of emotions (weakness!) associated with John had fooled Sherlock once before, when Moriarty had forced John to be his voice at the pool.

Perhaps John wasn’t even aware that he was playing Moriarty’s game. Perhaps he actually believed this was a real hospital.

“How are you feeling?” asked John.

“Disoriented,” returned Sherlock. That was safe, at least. Step one would be to play along with the game, so as to learn the rules. “I seem to be unable to access the memory of arriving here.”

“Do you remember shooting Moriarty in the head?” asked John bluntly, and Sherlock blinked, almost shocked into believing him. “Pity,” he shrugged. “It looked quite therapeutic. Would you like me to track down the footage?” Then he smiled, the slightly naughty but smugly joyous thing spreading across his face until it bubbled into a schoolboy giggle and Sherlock _knew_. There was no way that even Moriarty could have manufactured the sheer _Johnness_ of the moment and Sherlock was laughing along with him, relief rippling through his body in almost painful waves, unknotting muscles and battering on the locked doors of suppressed emotions.

If Moriarty was dead, then, it was over. Truly over. Eight months of torture and conditioning, lavish pain and sparingly rationed comfort, despair and relief, again and again. Eight months of fighting to keep essential pieces of himself locked away in his mind palace, switching and subverting his perceptions to make the necessary concessions bearable and to protect his very core while the transport submitted and survived. Eight months of pretending to be the dull mouse to Moriarty’s overconfident cat. Eight months of hoping, deep inside, that he was only pretending and that there would be enough _Sherlock_ left to take advantage when he finally found an opportunity to escape.

Obviously there had been. He wouldn’t mind seeing that video.

“Hungry?” asked Sherlock. He sat up carefully, then busied himself unpeeling the surgical tape holding his IV port in place.

“Starving,” admitted John. “What are you—”

Tape removed, Sherlock neatly extracted the cannula from his vein before John could stop him and dropped it into the medical waste container behind the bed. “Let’s go Chinese. I’m buying.”

“Sherlock, you need to stay for obser—”

“Nonsense.” Sherlock swung his legs off the bed, but waited for his system to acclimatise to the change in position before continuing. It would not help his case with John to faint; the man was clearly halfway to blocking the door already. “I’ve clearly already been screened for critical conditions. There’s no internal bleeding, concussion, or bruised organs or I wouldn’t be in an unmonitored ward. The nearly empty bag of dextrose saline on the IV stand is obviously my second within twelve hours, given that the completely empty bag in the medical waste bin has not been removed. Added together, the volume comprises well over ten percent of my body weight, the required level of fluid replacement for severe dehydration. No more would be administered intravenously unless I proved unable to take fluids orally. The morphine is not only unnecessary given my tolerance for pain, but given my drug history, I would certainly have refused consent if I had been awake when it was administered. Several lacerations on my back appear to have already been stitched and will heal no faster here than at home. I have no broken bones or movement limiting injuries. A psychiatric evaluation would, I can assure you from tedious experience, produce no results I did not wish to present. There is no further reason for me to remain in hospital.”

John was staring at him as though he’d never heard a chain of deductive reasoning before.

“This is usually the point where you say ‘brilliant’,” prompted Sherlock, wondering if some part of the ritual that ended in that had been lost in the reshuffle of his mind palace. Pity, he’d been looking forward to it.

“I thought you were dead,” said John hoarsely.

“I’m not,” said Sherlock. “Obviously.”

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” repeated John, a little louder. He seemed only one step away from screaming it, his eyes vivid and red-rimmed with worry and lack of sleep. “You lied to me, and I never thought I’d hear your stupid, _brilliant_ , smug, bloody arrogant voice again, you bloody insufferable _bloody_ _idiot_.”

“I’m alive,” repeated Sherlock.

“ _Why?_ ”

Sherlock didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Moriarty outmanoeuvred me. If I hadn’t convinced you, he would have killed you, and Mrs Hudson and Lestrade as well. The snipers were already in place. If I hadn’t faked my death I would have had to do it for real. I had thought I had him beaten. Unfortunately, I underestimated him, and he’d anticipated _that_ , too.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, John clearly still struggling with emotional overload. Seeing John’s rational mind was still not in control, Sherlock gave up on the hope of using logic to achieve his release from hospital and decided to appeal to the emotions.

“John,” he said. “I’m tired, sore, hungry, claustrophobic and very homesick, none of which will be helped by a stay in hospital. You are a doctor, and I’m told a very good one. You can observe me for further complications if you feel it’s necessary, but what I need right now is not another prison. I need normality. I need food, and I need to go home.”

Sherlock held his breath as John looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head wearily. “Chinese sounds wonderful,” he conceded, then moved back to his side and gently supported his elbow. “Try standing up. If you can make it to the bathroom, you can probably get changed out of the gown by yourself, Mycroft’s assistant dropped some clothes off earlier. I’ll be here to help if you get a bit giddy, the morphine can do that. It’s a very low dose; I’m sure you won’t have had enough to have to go through withdrawal again.”

“Mycroft will have someone’s head if I have,” said Sherlock darkly, leaning a little more heavily on John’s arm than he’d hoped to, but John ignored the weight and giggled again. “What?”

“Well, you know how you said I should have taken Mycroft’s money to spy on you? How do you feel about being my official assignment from MI5?”

Together, they made their way slowly to the door.


	3. Tenuous Connections

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty plays with air, Sherlock plays to survive, and John plays an unwanted part.

_Sherlock came awake in a surge of adrenaline, lungs heaving in short, shallow spasms, his body instinctively thrashing against his restraints as it fought to dislodge the hand clamped too tight around his throat._

_“Oooh, shhhh,” cooed Moriarty, kneeling astride his chest, eyes bright with Sherlock’s panic. He slapped Sherlock sharply and without changing expression, then solidly braced his other hand’s stranglehold. “Don’t struggle, lovely. You know I wouldn’t really hurt you. Well, probably not, anyway. Not unless you made me. Or I got bored. That’s it, shhhh, push it down, relax.”_

_Sherlock's mind was a fog, startled from sleep and flooded with instinctual terror, but he wrestled the panic down as though it was that which was strangling him and surfaced victorious. Obvious fact: there was no point fighting physically while handcuffed and pinned down, weak from pain and deprivation. Sherlock forced his limbs still, but kept his eyes fixed hatefully on the man above him._

_Query: what was this_ about _?_

_He had finally conceded, earlier, to end his hunger strike; to kneel obediently by Moriarty’s chair as the other man ate, begging for and being granted morsels to lick from his fingers. He’d found the required begging—and the unavoidable pet references—significantly less humiliating than being force-fed after refusing to do so which was, he knew, the point._

_Sherlock had known the strike would be ultimately futile, but it had been a necessary play for power. He’d been rewarded for his compliance with the opportunity to sleep—admittedly, it was in Moriarty’s bed—but, too tired and drained to care about the implications of that after five weeks of catnaps between torture, even naked and with his hands cuffed to the headboard, his nostrils filled with the other man’s scent and feeling eyes watching him in hungry anticipation, Sherlock had immediately fallen asleep._

_But Moriarty's next move was unclear.  Information required: what did he hope to gain?  Observation: strangulation. Observation: cooperation requested. Observation: no meaningful decision points provided.  Action: play along until theorisation becomes possible._

_Sherlock’s limbs trembled with the effort to hold them still, his lungs panting desperately for more air, his throat seizing halfway between a gag and a cough as the fingers dug in deeper._

_“Oh, I_ like _you like this,” sang Moriarty, transported with delight, cradling Sherlock’s cheek as he traced the open, gasping shape of his lips with a reverent thumb, “mind on the edge of control over the monkey. Shhhh, my dear, you’re doing well, don’t spoil it, you’re—”_

_The words faded out of comprehension, instinct took over, but Sherlock was too weak to struggle now anyway as Moriarty’s mouth descended on his, cutting off what felt like the last fraction of air in the world, vision greying, eyes rolling up in his head, and..._

_Awareness exploded like a supernova and a full breath seared into his lungs, just one, Moriarty gifting it from his own lips in an absurd parody of the kiss of life. Then the fingers tightened around Sherlock’s neck again._

_Sherlock convulsed, mind fighting alongside body this time. His shoulders wrenched against bound wrists, his hips bucked, endeavouring to rotate his legs and flip over, but Moriarty just laughed, slapping him again and shifting his weight easily to counterbalance the feeble attempt. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he chided. “You’ll push yourself into cardiac arrest, and_ won’t _this be fun after I’ve broken a couple of ribs resuscitating you?”_

_Sherlock fought a few moments longer, more against the futility than in any real hope of success, then forced his muscles limp even as the unstoppable panting accelerated, oxygen deprivation deepening more suddenly this time._

_“Shhhh, my darling,” Moriarty whispered against Sherlock’s lips, tingling and numb as his blood pH sank, the faint touch barely there in the increasingly frantic puffs of air. “Your brain is fecking gorgeous even half drowned in carbon dioxide. Makes me want to drill a hole into your skull so I can really—shhhh, hold still, you’re doing beautifully—so I can_ really _fuck your mind.”_

_Then everything started to fade, and Moriarty briefly slackened his grip and firmed his mouth, breathing for Sherlock once again._

_It was absurd, a tiny dry corner of Sherlock’s mind scoffed as he forced his body still once more and endured the choking grasp of Moriarty’s hand, the moist whisper of breath over his lips, the litany of psychopathic endearments. He knew the air wasn’t being cut off to his lungs; blood was being slowed on its way to his brain, pooling carbon dioxide and depleting oxygen there, the pressure on his vagas nerve and diaphragm slowing his heart, the other man’s palm on his larynx just enough to bring on panic without risking compression damage or a hyoid fracture. His body fought to draw in more air instinctively, as though it could bypass the carotid artery, even though the hyperventilation only alcalised his blood and masked the problem. The only way to stop this was to work out what Moriarty... what he... what... wanted..._

_The third time the world went grey, the euphoric flush of blood back into Sherlock’s brain was accompanied by a full-body epiphany._

_Obvious conclusion: Moriarty wanted to make Sherlock_ kiss _him_.

 _In the low-oxygen environment, solving even a minor manufactured puzzle triggered that glorious intellectual high that reached deep into his brain and flipped all the switches with the answer to_ what _and_ why _—the same switches that raised the hand with a poison pill to his mouth or tested experimental drugs on his only friend—bypassing the higher functioning question of whether or not it was a good idea._

_Sherlock surged up in the momentary freedom, mashing their mouths harder together, teeth clashing painfully against the other man’s, noses colliding, trying to reconstruct what he’d observed of this—there was supposed to be something to do with tongues, wasn’t there?_

_Moriarty caught his face with both hands, caressing Sherlock's cheeks with his thumbs as he guided the angle. He gentled the frenzied, inexperienced kiss, matching his breathing to the slowing pace of Sherlock’s gasps, lips sliding and sucking, tongue coaxing Sherlock’s out into a shy dance of back and forward, flicking and twirling. Sherlock’s head spun in the small eternity of floating calm, the high stronger than cocaine; lightning filaments of clarity crackling through the confusing chemical cocktail of sudden oxygen, acidosis, adrenal letdown, endorphins, and the unaccustomed intensity of human contact, of tenderness…_

_The kiss slowed and reluctantly separated, lips lingering for a soft moment before parting. Dazed and disoriented, Sherlock tried to comprehend his ability to breathe without it, tried to assemble recent events into some kind of lucid order._

_Observation: blood flow unrestricted.  Observation: brain function remains compromised._

_“Your first, yes?” said Moriarty as coherence returned, his eyes blazing with closely banked triumph. “Big Brother thought so, but I couldn’t be certain until you gave it to me.”_

_He smoothed a hand across Sherlock’s throat, pressing delicately over his earlier finger marks just a shade too lightly to constrict the arteries. The implication was clear; consent was not optional and, now the line had been crossed, it was solely Moriarty’s decision as to when he would cheerfully push Sherlock back over again._

_This, thought Sherlock as the delayed realisation that he hadn’t intended to lose that round quite so soon—or quite so conclusively—shuddered through his reeling mind, this was going to be a problem. He hadn’t anticipated Moriarty inventing a bizarre seduction strategy which could bypass his higher reasoning functions and actually work on Sherlock Holmes. Even drugs would only prevent a victim from struggling, not turn them into an active participant._

_“I can’t help myself,” snarked Sherlock hoarsely, the words rasping in his abused airway. “You take my breath away.”_

_Moriarty laughed in delight; the horrified admiration hadn’t been as drowned by sarcasm as Sherlock had hoped. “I_ knew _you’d appreciate me. I’ve never done this with someone who_ understands _before. Usually it’s all terrified snivelling and pleading for mercy at this point, but you’re_ magnificent _! How many times do you think we’ll have to do this before your brain decides to pass out on all on its own unless you kiss me?”_

_Sherlock glared. “Many, many times.”_

_“Oh, I_ do _hope so; I so enjoy this stage, but it never lasts.” His fingertips stroked a gentle caress over the bruised skin at Sherlock’s throat. “Oh well! Maybe you’ll be different. I’ll tell you what; if you make it a fortnight, you can have a reward.”_

_Sherlock eyed him dubiously. “What reward?”_

_“Twenty-four hours with me. No pain. No restraints. No touching. Well, not unless you want me to.” Moriarty waggled his eyebrows outrageously. “Clothes, if you insist. A seat at the table. A knife and fork. A real night’s sleep. We can even play solve-the-crime if you like, although it won’t be as much fun without forfeits. You’ll have to promise to be good, of course. Misbehave, and all bets are off. And maybe if you’re_ very _good, we can do it again sometime.”_

 _Of course it wasn’t really a reward, it was merely the next stage of Moriarty’s plan for captor bonding. It gave Moriarty ownership, not only over his own actions, but over any resistance that Sherlock offered. And a day of rest and personal freedom? Ha! After two weeks of forced intimacy the habit of expectation would be formed; anticipation would crawl in Sherlock’s blood like the unwelcome craving for a drug. And Moriarty would be pleasant and intelligent company, always hovering_ just _within range to touch but never reaching out, deliberately confusing Sherlock’s subconscious as to the difference between the dread of touch and the actual desire for it._

 _But like every step of compliance in Moriarty’s game, it would also be a true reward merely by reducing the level of unpleasantness. Two weeks of—strangulation aside—minimal torture, as Moriarty maximised their time together trying to ‘win’ his bet. Then a whole_ day _in which Sherlock’s skin was his own, unsullied by violence or unwanted contact. A whole day of glorious_ Work _, of access and insight into Moriarty’s network—even if solve-the-crime was an obvious precursor to improve-the-crime and then create-the-crime. A whole day in which the battleground would be his brain, not his body, and even if Moriarty could force his transport to betray him, he couldn’t do the same with his mind. Not yet, at least._

_Moriarty tilted his head to one side as he watched Sherlock’s train of thought run towards acquiescence._

_“You know,” he said conversationally, tone unchanging as his fingers once more dug painfully into Sherlock’s carotid arteries, “you could love me. I would hardly even have to try. You’re not like me. You actually_ like _this. I enjoy a challenge, as long as I know I’ll win in the end. But for you it’s no fun without the knife edge, one slip away from losing everything. You love my games because deep down, you want to lose, and you know that I will_ always _beat you.”_

_“Not true,” Sherlock gasped. “Never been. Good loser.”_

_“Oh, your big brother told me all about_ that _.” Moriarty’s face dipped close again, but Sherlock denied him, pressed his lips together. “But you and I know those tantrums over childish games weren’t because you lost, they were because you’d made a_ mistake _. You want someone who will win even when you’ve brought your best game,” he breathed as a bright shrinking halo formed on the edge of Sherlock’s vision. “Someone who can prove they’re_ better _than—”_

_Sherlock wrenched his face to the side at the last moment, dodging the kiss._

_The lights went out._

_***_

“Sherlock? Are you okay in there?”

It was the third time John had asked the question, knocking firmly on the bathroom door. They’d made it home to Baker Street just an hour before, and Sherlock had taken himself straight off for a shower. God knew Sherlock was entitled to a long shower if he wanted after spending eight months as Moriarty’s personal plaything. John felt unclean after just _seeing_ Moriarty’s hands on Sherlock; he couldn’t begin to imagine how Sherlock himself felt after the abuse he’d clearly suffered. He’d already double-checked that the suture equipment was complete in his first aid kit, just in case Sherlock tore any stitches scrubbing the memory of Moriarty’s touch away—unfortunately not uncommon in a sexual assault victim. John couldn’t help cringing at the idea of intruding on what was probably the first real privacy Sherlock had had since his capture, but the hot water had to have run out by now. It had been too long.

He knocked again. “Sherlock? I’m concerned you might have passed out again. If you can’t answer, I need to come in and check on you.”

There was no response. Christ.

Softly, John opened the door and looked inside.

“Sherlock? Can you hear me?”

From the shape of the silhouette behind the shower curtain, it looked like he was slumped on the floor. John strode forward, but paused when he reached the shower and crouched before easing the curtain back gently, not wanting to startle Sherlock if he was still conscious. Sherlock was huddled with his arms around his knees under the beating spray of cold water, rocking faintly back and forth. Jesus, he was thin.

“Sherlock?” asked John tentatively. He slowly reached out a hand to the other man’s shoulder. “Sher—”

The moment John’s hand made contact, Sherlock moved with a speed that made John rock back on his heels and fall against the bathroom cabinet. For a moment, he thought Sherlock was going to hit him, but then Sherlock was burrowed into his arms, the moisture from his wet body soaking into John’s jumper. It took John a moment to realise Sherlock wasn’t just trembling, he was sobbing, gasping great gulps of air and trying to speak, but John couldn’t understand more than one word in ten.

“Need... John... tried... all mixed...”

“Shhhhh,” he soothed as best he could, wrapping his arms around Sherlock and cradling his head against his shoulder, threading his fingers into wet hair and rocking the other man gently, keeping up Sherlock’s rhythm from before. “Shh, it’s okay, you don’t have to explain, it’s okay.”

“It is _not_ ‘okay’!” snapped Sherlock, rearing back to look at John, suddenly coherent, and John had _missed_ this so much—the lightning fast changes of temperament so complete that it made you think Sherlock must be switching between souls. “I was _trying_ to protect myself and I’ve managed to—” Sherlock made a wordless cry of frustration and surged to his feet, careless of his nudity, fisting both hands in his hair as though trying to pull it out by the roots. “You don’t understand. You _can’t_ understand, but now I’m going to have to _explain_ in _tiny little words_ because you’re an idiot, but I’m going to need you while I reintegrate everything or I’ll end up...” He let out another wordless cry and, incandescent with frustration, stormed out of the bathroom gesticulating wildly.

“Right, then,” said John to himself, still sitting on the bathroom floor. “Sounds like we’re going to need a pot of tea.”

***

Ten minutes later, Sherlock was dressed in his ratty pyjamas and silk robe. Two mugs of steaming tea sat on the coffee table, and John had carefully seated himself at the far right of the couch so that Sherlock could choose whether to sit close for comfort or further away for space.

He _had_ set a plate of toast with honey beside the teapot in case Sherlock could manage something more to eat after having picked at some plain rice in the restaurant. When Sherlock saw it, he’d run back into the bathroom to throw up, so John had quietly thrown it away.

He was back now, and pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, ignoring the tea and muttering under his breath. From the little John managed to catch about idiots, he assumed Sherlock was attempting to work out what to tell him. Then Sherlock whirled and, pinning John with piercing glare, demanded, “Do you know how my mind palace works?”

“I looked it up after the first time you mentioned it,” said John, “so I could work out how to describe it on my blog. It’s called the method of loci, right? It’s a memory trick where you associate things you need to remember with well-known items so they—”

“Boring!” snapped Sherlock, and finally came to rest, crouching in an armchair, knees under his chin and fingers steepled in front of them, staring at John. “I suppose I should be glad that was all you explained to your tiny-minded readers, because it meant it was my one capability that Moriarty _did_ underestimate. My mind palace is much more than just a method of perfect recall. It allows me to organise, sort, store, and to recognise commonalities in information, to follow threads to build connections or discount irrelevancies. Long before I discovered I could permanently delete superfluous information to free up room, I found a way to do what a series of child psychiatrists called _suppressing_ things, a nasty word with nasty connotations, but I think of as essentially locking the doors and temporarily forgetting whole rooms that aren’t currently useful. I can take disturbing memories, irrelevant details, fear, worry, or even pain or hunger and lock them away so that I don’t remember them or experience them in the moment and they don’t distract me or lead to biased deductions. Do you see?”

“In theory.” Truthfully, John wasn’t surprised the psychiatrist had been concerned by this habit. “You saw a child psychiatrist about it?”

Sherlock gave him a bored look. “I was diagnosed with sociopathy, John. I saw numerous child psychiatrists, all of whom were marvellously well-informed as to how to ‘fix’ my brain.”

“Wait,” said John, wrongfooted. “You really are a sociopath? I thought you just said that to rile up Donovan.”

“I don’t really fit the mould,” dismissed Sherlock, “but they seemed very keen to classify me somehow. In any case, I was pronounced cured after I discovered how to do the inverse of locking things down—to closet myself with a carefully chosen set of memories and emotions, completely immersing myself in whatever persona I chose. You have seen how convincing an actor I can be, John, but it is not so much acting as _becoming_ in that moment what I have chosen to present. Deceiving the last psychiatrist that she’d cured me of my habit of deceiving people was an excellent dry run for convincing Moriarty that he had been thoroughly successful in breaking me.”

“So you’re saying,” said John, taking a dubious sip of tea, “that you’ve not been traumatised by what happened because you could, what, act the part and then delete it or lock it all away so that it doesn’t affect you? I’m sorry, but I can’t believe that, Sherlock. You just threw up at the sight of a piece of toast.”

“It was the _tea_ , John,” snapped Sherlock, impatient. “Not the toast. And of _course_ I’m traumatised. I might have been able to lock away pieces of myself and switch out memories to minimise the psychological damage, but I had to sacrifice pieces, too. It takes real memories and emotions to make an act believable, and Moriarty was _good_ , very nearly too good for me. He did everything he could to drag all of me to the foreground.”

John carefully set his mug down on the side table as though it was a grenade. He wasn’t sure precisely where whatever problem Sherlock now had with tea cut in, but he was hyperaware of the potential to trigger it again. Sherlock didn’t seem to notice; he was up and pacing again.

“The conditioned responses act on a level even _I_ can’t control—until I’ve dealt with them, I won’t be able to wear a scarf, play chess, hear the violin, or even drink a bloody cup of _tea_ without hitting some kind of trigger that makes my body respond without reference to my brain. Not to mention that Moriarty’s death appears to have blown a hole through a whole section of my mind palace and prompted me to hastily lock down a huge jumble of unpleasant memories, regardless of the importance of their content or their connections to other matters. I had to draw on pieces of everything I’d ever done to make him believe he had everything I was, so almost anything could cascade into another panic attack. When I tried entering my mind palace to assess the damage, I completely lost control, triggered a full-blown flashback, and ended up sobbing into the shower drain. It’s intolerable!”

Sherlock looked so dismayed at the apparent weakness of his own mind, that were it not for the very real seriousness of the subject matter, it would have been funny.

“My filing system’s collapsed,” Sherlock continued. “Everything’s mixed up together with the genuine information Moriarty kept feeding me so I wouldn’t just disengage my mind while he did whatever he liked to my body, and I _need_ that information, John. I need to sift through it all before it goes stale so that we can disassemble his network without one of his lieutenants taking over where he left off. But as long as I can remain calm during the process, I believe I can navigate and understand my own mind well enough to extract the information and fix the damage.”

“You’re planning on fixing yourself, then,” John said carefully.

Sherlock bared his teeth briefly, and sat down again directly across from John. “I ate psychiatrists for breakfast when I was _nine_. They wouldn’t know where to start on what Moriarty did, least of all without trying to fix what makes me extraordinary. They cannot understand his methods any more than they can understand my mind, and there is no point in them trying. But I will need your assistance, at least at first.”

“I’m a surgeon, Sherlock, not a psychiatrist. I know the basics, of course, and I did a unit on trauma counselling before they deployed me to Afganistan, but...” John spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t think I’m qualified to help you with this.”

“Good. Qualifications are not what I need from you. They’d only lead you to make assumptions even more idiotic than usual.”

“So what is it you need from my idiotic self?” huffed John. Oddly enough, he’d even missed being called an idiot.

“Moriarty wanted me to trust him, to crave his approval and his touch until I could no longer even contemplate escape or disobedience. He wanted me to feel safe with him and only him. And now he’s gone.”

“Safe?” demanded John. “He _tortured_ you. And, he, he—” John took a deep breath, emboldened by Sherlock’s oblique references, but no, he couldn’t say it. He could barely think it.

“I know you read my chart, John. The word you are searching for is _rape_. He raped me. Many, many times.” John sucked in a deep breath, but stayed very still, feeling somehow as though if he didn’t move for the rest of his life, he couldn’t make anything worse. “But it wasn’t my body he wanted,” continued Sherlock, seemingly unmoved by his bald statement. “Yes, he took full advantage of my transport because it was another way to hurt me, and because he could; yes, he was sexually excited by the conditioning process and by my distress, but it was predominantly a means to an end. What he really wanted was my mind. He wanted me to _want_ him despite myself. He wanted me to fall in love with him.”

Sherlock leaned forward, elbows on his knees and pale eyes fixed on John.

“I knew what he was doing, John. I _knew_ every move before it happened, because behaviour modification is _deeply_ boring, but it _works_. He never participated in the torture; he delegated that responsibility to his men. On the contrary, his presence signalled a temporary respite from the pain. I ate from his fingers, drank from his cup, slept in his bed, knelt by his side. The only stimulation for my mind amid the monotony of pain was assisting in his work. The only gentle human contact I felt was his touch. The fulfilment of every basic human necessity became dependent on him. By the end I _begged_ to be allowed to please him, not just to avoid punishment, but because of all those basic human necessities, his approval had become the most essential. To fool Moriarty, I needed to fight and lose the battle naturally. To minimise the damage to my mind, I had to retain the capacity to separate _him_ from those ingrained responses.”

John felt sick. He rubbed a tired hand over his face, and wished he knew whether he could finish his cup of tea.

“You can drink the tea,” said Sherlock, unerringly reading John’s mind. “It didn’t seem to bother me when you were drinking it earlier, but the smell caught me by surprise at the same moment that I saw the teapot. We might have to work up to watching you pour.”

At John’s questioning look, Sherlock explained, without expression, “Two of his men would hold me down. A third held my nose and kept pouring. It was possibly my least favourite activity, because aside from the fact that half drowning in near-boiling tea is extremely unpleasant, they would only do it when I was getting severely dehydrated, to get some fluids back into me if Moriarty was away and not due back for several more days. It meant there was no respite in sight.”

John didn’t feel like tea anymore. “I’m sorry, Sherlock. No one should have to go through that.”

“I did what I had to and I survived. I made him think he’d won. But to make him believe it, I had to make _myself_ believe it. I went through his process and even though it was partially an act, I couldn’t help but develop a conditioned response as a result.” Sherlock actually looked a trifle embarrassed at this failing. “What I _could_ do is transfer the subject, do you see?”

“Spell it out, Sherlock,” said John slowly. “Remember I’m an idiot.”

“I had to submit to the action without submitting to _him_. So I filtered my memories. Relabelled rooms. Warped my perceptions. In my mind,” said Sherlock, “I substituted him for you.”

“He—you—he—” John shot to his feet, inarticulate with horror. “He _raped_ you! And you convinced yourself it was _me_? Jesus _Christ_ , Sherlock!”

“Moriarty would have raped my body anyway.” Sherlock’s voice was quiet and serene. “But in my mind, I could give you consent.”

“I thought you were—” John started, then broke off, clenching his fists so hard that pain radiated up his forearms. That wasn’t the point.

Sherlock was watching him calmly. Too calmly. The dismay and embarrassment that had crossed his features earlier was gone – forgotten or deleted or locked away, whatever Sherlock did with emotions he found inconvenient.

John sank back onto the couch. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t overreact, wouldn’t blame Sherlock for anything. Sherlock had been through hell and back again. He wasn’t to blame for anything. Not for _anything_.

“ _Jesus_ ,” John said again, fervently. “I’m sorry, it’s just a shock. You did what you had to, to survive. You, you are _brilliant_ , do you hear?”

“I know,” agreed Sherlock, without expression.

John wished he could do as Sherlock did, lock away or delete the roiling horror in his belly so he could think. _Jesus_ , he swore again, internally. Sherlock probably didn’t have the faintest clue how dirty it made him feel, as though it had actually been _John_ who had... forced him. Not just forced him, but _molested_ him, desecrated that indefinable innocence Sherlock possessed, the innocence that never failed to charm John whenever Sherlock revealed his spectacular ignorance on various aspects of human relations. John had never even slept with Sarah because she’d had three glasses of wine before the only time she’d ever suggested it and he hadn’t been certain she was capable of consent, and now Sherlock thought of _him_ as…

God. He wanted to vomit. He wanted some air. He wanted to _bathe_ in hand sanitiser.

But this wasn’t about what he wanted, it was about what Sherlock _needed_ , about helping _Sherlock_ deal with what had happened. It didn’t matter how John felt, because what Sherlock had been through dwarfed any discomfort of John’s. _Jesus_.

He’d _missed_ Sherlock so much. John had limped his way through every grey day when Sherlock was gone, knowing that the world was a darker place without the most relentlessly extraordinary man, the most incandescently beautiful mind, the most vividly passionate, strangely childish heart he’d ever known. He’d opened John’s eyes to the war around him, delighted with him in its macabre absurdity, drawn him into its adrenaline-soaked intrigue. Sherlock was unique, irrepressible, spectacular and irreplaceable, and then he had _died_ and left John alone in the battlefield he could no longer even see.

And, just when a miracle happened, when Sherlock had risen from the dead like the incredible, glorious avenging angel he was and sent Moriarty to hell where he belonged, came the terrible price. James Moriarty had managed to befoul their friendship and make Sherlock _afraid_ of him.

The world had Sherlock Holmes back. But John Watson never would.

“Right.” John pinched his nose, trying to force the emotions away before the sting of tears in his eyes spilled over. He was being a big girl’s blouse about this, right when Sherlock needed him to be calm and dependable. “I see. All right. So I’m assuming you need me to move out. I can sleep on Harry’s couch tonight. The last thing I want would be to remind you of... anything.”

Sherlock smiled faintly. “Excellent deduction, John, but entirely incorrect as usual. My modification of Moriarty’s training regime had several effects, none of them detrimental to our friendship. It allowed me to separate Moriarty’s roles as my tormentor and protector. It allowed me to displace the anchor-points of the web he spun to bind me to him. It allowed me to make concessions in my surface persona according to his timetable, even though I had locked away my own coping mechanisms to protect… and you’re not following any of this, are you?”

John blinked at him, realising that he was right. He’d been listening, hearing the words as they lined up for attention, but when he thought about them, they didn’t mean anything. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess there’s a reason I don’t have a mind palace.”

“The _material point_ ,” said Sherlock, frustrated but pressing on, “is that I appear to have been left little... perhaps the word would be _clingy_. As soon as I stepped into the bathroom alone, my heart rate elevated to thirty-six beats per minute above resting, and I became extremely anxious despite being in what I intellectually knew was a safe environment. Four times, while I was standing under the hot water, I mistakenly believed that I had glimpsed one of Moriarty’s men through the curtain, causing a further surge of anxiety. The moment I entered my mind palace, I was overwhelmed. Yet almost as soon as you entered the room and offered comfort, I regained control. It wasn’t being _with_ Moriarty that I feared—that was never his game—it was being _without_ him. More to the point, given the way I had filtered my perceptions, I feared being without _you_.”

Sherlock’s hand appeared between them, palm up, unthreatening and peremptory as usual in an unspoken demand for John’s. John had covered it with his own before he could even think that it might not be a good idea.

“I have just experienced an endorphin release. A pervasive feeling of safety. The low-level anxiety is fading, and my heart rate is dropping... fifteen... ten... now down to only seven beats per minute above my previous resting heart rate. In answer to your other question, John,” he continued, his dry, factual tone unchanging, “I _am_ married to my work. I am asexual. I do not experience any significant sexual urges or desires for a romantic relationship. I am capable of enjoying human contact, and of tolerating the attentions of another person, but I have no ambition to further that connection or repeat the experience. You need not concern yourself that I will solicit your attention beyond that of a friend in need.”

“Sherlock, I wasn’t worried about—” John looked down at their joined hands and realised Sherlock was taking his pulse, whether because he particularly wanted to measure John’s reaction or simply because he was Sherlock, John didn’t know. “I don’t think I can take in much more right now,” he admitted. “If you’re explaining things for the sake of my tiny little mind, maybe you’d just better tell me what you need from me.”

Sherlock shrugged, a thin shoulder shifting inside his slim shirt. “I would like you to stay close, particularly if I need to work in my mind palace. Be ready to draw me out if I have another... _episode_. Understand that I may respond in ways you would consider strange when you do or if you leave the room. Sleep in the same room with me, in the same bed if you wouldn’t mind—no,” Sherlock cut off John’s wordless protest, “I am quite serious on that point. Sleep was perhaps even more of a treat than food; apart from brief periods where I passed out from the pain and was reawoken by its continued application, I have not slept out of Moriarty’s arms for many months. I am quite certain I will not be able put aside the expectation of torture and relax if you are not in the room. The best compromise I am able to offer would be, if you prefer, to pretend that I am not sneaking into your room in the middle of the night and curling up on the floor beside your bed, but I expect you won’t find that acceptable.” He gave John’s palm a squeeze then released it and withdrew his hand, shuddering. “Let me stay close while I work on sorting out...” he made a vague gesture to his head, “ _this_ mess. Then I’ll be completely fine.”

“I don’t think it’s really a very healthy way to deal with what happened,” said John, expressing the feeling of foreboding as mildly as he could manage. “But if you’re sure that’s what you want, I guess that’s where we need to start.”

“I’m absolutely certain.”

“And you’ll tell me straight away if I make you uncomfortable?”

“I became comfortable with James Moriarty’s hands wrapped around my throat, John. I don’t think you could.”

John only just managed to stop his eyes from dropping to the awful handprint bruise that stood out vividly against the pale skin of Sherlock's neck. _Jesus_ , he mouthed to himself. Sherlock really did live on a different planet to the rest of humanity.

“You’ll _tell me_ ,” he repeated, “if I _ever_ make you uncomfortable in _any way whatsoever_.”

Sherlock’s faint smile returned. “Yes, John. I’ll tell you if you make me uncomfortable.”


	4. Heartbeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty has a heart, Sherlock hides his heart, and Mycroft provides armour.

_Sherlock had known the attempt was doomed to failure._

_The baits had been a trifle too obvious to be anything but deliberate loopholes in security. A guard’s momentary inattention to his taser. An overheard conversation about a football match screening in the security room. A few moments unsupervised. Sherlock had watched them come and go stoically, refusing to participate in the boring game. If Moriarty wanted to punish him for attempting to escape—and the punishment would be severe, he knew—then he was going to have to try harder than that._

_Sherlock would come out to play, but Moriarty would hardly believe his eventual capitulation to be real if he didn’t put on a good enough performance of being himself._

_The obvious baits died away, to leave less obvious baits. A paperclip falling apparently unnoticed from a stack of papers. A guard whose expression occasionally tinged with guilt and whose blows actually lightened when Sherlock reached the point of begging for mercy. Sherlock ignored them, too. Boring._

_There were also the subtler openings, the kind that had been there all along, but never lined up to form a path all the way to the outside. The lingering gaze of a guard on his body combined with increased viciousness afterwards, indicating suppressed homosexuality redirected into homophobia. Adhesive residue on the left sock of another proclaiming a weak ankle. The pinkish cast to a visible undervest of a third showing a new girlfriend handling the laundry._

_It was time._

_Sherlock endured until the three of them were finished, transferring him through the corridor to the next room—the setup of the rooms kept changing, so he would never know before the door opened whether inside would be waiting some new variety of pain, or the sight of Moriarty with food, comfort, intellectual stimulation, and increasingly insistent sexual harassment. Moriarty’s men were always careful not to give him lasting injuries, but usually, during transfer, he was limp with fatigue and the creeping feeling of hope that the worst part of the ordeal was once again, for the moment at least, over._

_Today, he was overplaying the role slightly, weaving unsteadily along the corridor and slurring in French. Bad Ankle grasped Sherlock’s upper arm on one side, Homophobe on the other, while New Girlfriend unlocked the handcuffs from behind him, leaving the bracelets dangling from one wrist, then walked around the group to re-cuff his hands in front._

_Deduction: the room he was about to enter could contain Moriarty, who recently preferred to give Sherlock a limited amount of freedom to further the illusion of cooperation, as though the implicit threat to end the visit early and deliver Sherlock on to the next round of torture didn’t completely obviate any capacity for consent. Alternatively, it could contain a hook on the ceiling, which was never a good sign for the immediate future. No matter; Sherlock didn’t intend to go any further._

_“S’nice,” he murmured deliriously, awkwardly dodging New Girlfriend’s hand as it reached for his wrist to refasten the cuff. Leaning onto Homophobe, he stroked a wavering finger to the pink triangle of vest visible at the collar of New Girlfriend’s shirt. “Think t’boss’d like us all t’wear pink.” Sherlock let his face fall wearily into Homophobe’s neck, then shifted his lips and breathed wetly against the other man’s skin._

_The reaction was violent and instantaneous: the hulking Homophobe shoved Sherlock away, recoiling from the contact as if he’d been burned. Sherlock reeled with unerring accuracy into Bad Ankle, who stumbled and, as he stepped back to_ almost _catch himself on the injured foot, Sherlock hooked the other ankle, sagging further backwards with all his weight and sending him sprawling._

_He surged up again with the heel of his palm extended for a blow under New Girlfriend’s chin, knocking him out, and drove an elbow into Homophobe’s solar plexus, sending the man to his knees, gasping._

_The door of the room flew open at the sound of the scuffle, framing the small form of Moriarty himself._

_Moriarty’s dark eyes took in the scene instantly, and he drew his arm back for the corrective slap that regularly came when he was displeased with Sherlock’s level of cooperation. High on adrenaline, Sherlock stepped into the blow and blocked it, barely noticing the instinctive urge to cringe at the assault from which he’d never yet dared defend himself, and returned a solid punch to the cheekbone. He kneed Moriarty in the stomach and, as he doubled over, followed up with a downward elbow to the back of the neck that sent the other man to the ground._

_Eyes locked on the falling form of his captor, options ran through Sherlock’s mind at lightning speed._

_Potential action: take Moriarty hostage. Observation: Moriarty was stronger than he looked, a dirty fighter in a corner, and had the unpredictable disregard for his own safety of the truly insane.  It would slow him down at best, and be nearly impossible to maintain control of the other man in Sherlock’s weakened state. Observation: the guards were armed with tranquilisers. Deduction: it would buy him barely a moment’s hesitation before the guards simply shot them both to regain control of the situation and let the boss sleep it off. Conclusion: infeasible._

_Alternative action: kill Moriarty before continuing his escape attempt. Observation: would require approximately twenty seconds delay, even in the unlikely event that Moriarty was too dazed to struggle. Deduction: the already slim possibility of escape would become non-existent, and at that point the guards would show him no mercy. Observation: Sherlock wasn’t so ready to give up on escape as an option that he would consider suicide as a preferable alternative. Conclusion: infeasible._

_Before the groaning guards had begun to react—before Moriarty’s stunned form had even hit the ground—Sherlock had discarded the additional options presented by the other man’s presence and, adrenaline giving wings to his feet, run like hell._

_A map of the compound lit up in his head and he dodged around a corner, heading for the emergency stairs. The keycard reader on the door provided a four second delay while he kicked it off the wall and connected two wires manually. The LED flashed green as the lock clicked, and Sherlock pulled open the door, pausing to tear the wires completely out of the wall before he slipped through and pulled it closed. He grinned at the thunk of the lock reengaging permanently. Luck was obviously on his side; this was going much better than he’d hoped._

_The closed door almost blocked out the sound of Moriarty’s roar of rage and the confused shouts of the guards as he flew up the stairs, barely touching every third one. Now he was off the floor where he’d spent the last nine weeks and running blind, going only on what he’d deduced of the compound’s structure from the idle comments of the guards and what he knew of Moriarty._

_He was underground, of course, at least three levels. In central London, from the consistent patterns of dirt on the guard’s shoes. In an unknown subbasement of some public building, most likely one of the underground stations given the stone of the walls. There would be at least two more checkpoints before he reached a public area, and they would be on full alert. If he could make it past both, he stood a good chance of blending with the crowd, taking the tube and completely disappearing, but that was a ridiculously large ‘if’._

_He successfully dodged four guards with tranquiliser guns, then rounded the corner towards where he’d deduced the exit to be and came face to face with a fifth. He’d known there_ would _be a fifth guard, but he had been unable to pinpoint his location. His last thought before his eyes slid closed and his legs turned to the consistency of over boiled noodles, was a grim satisfaction._

_Observation: The guard had been red-faced and breathing heavily. He’d had to run to catch Sherlock._

_Deduction: This really_ hadn’t _been one of Moriarty’s choreographed escape attempts. Success._

_When Sherlock awoke again, for a moment he wasn’t entirely sure that he was awake at all. He opened his eyes to see nothing. Hear nothing. Feel... not quite nothing. Observation: no apparent response to his attempt to move, except a slight shift in pressure at his wrists and ankles. Observation: a mask over his face. Observation: the faint ripple of water in his hair. Ah._

_Deduction: this was a sensory deprivation tank._

_Moriarty had chosen well for the supreme punishment for misbehaviour in an easily bored genius. Pain could be measured, strikes counted, torturers deduced, boredom kept substantially at bay while the brain—always Sherlock’s most sensitive organ—remained substantially separate. The torture that filled most of Sherlock’s schedule, he knew, was excruciating and unbearable, but as far as Moriarty was concerned, it was really only a way of filling time. It created the chemical environment in Sherlock’s brain to suitably frame the moment when Moriarty returned to bring a relative respite from it all. If Moriarty had truly wished to break him down, rather than play with him, all he would have had to do was leave Sherlock in a tank like this until he was a drooling, gibbering mess. Moriarty was still having fun, ergo this was only a warning, but it would not be pleasant._

_The first three hours, he decided to take advantage of the rare break and retreated to his mind palace. His fingers twitched, eyes moving rapidly as he sorted through the information he’d gathered during the last few weeks of his stay with Moriarty, synthesised it with his previous observations, then re-examined every interaction for hidden clues or missed tells. He explored his own plans, developing contingencies and fall back positions, then reworked each one on the assumption that Moriarty had predicted it, then reworked those on the same assumption again and again until he reached the point where the plan didn’t change no matter how many levels of indirection he put it through._

_Then he began to elaborate and refine his surface persona for the battle, storing it in the massive entrance hall of his mind palace. He’d always worked inside a small room deep inside his palace for short term deceptions. It made it easier to keep track so that he could slip into character again if he needed to. But this persona would need depth, real depth; Moriarty would not be fooled by a shallow copy, and who knew how long he would be trapped in the role? He couldn’t retreat too quickly, or Moriarty wouldn’t trust his capitulation, no matter how genuine it was to his surface persona. Neither could he afford to attempt to hold ground for too long, or he himself may become irretrievably lost._

_Painstakingly, he selected and stockpiled memories to make his actions natural, changing some of the details and warping his own perceptions where necessary, tucking the original memories and the inner strengths that would encourage him resist away, out of reach._

_Obviously the entire history of his relationship with Mycroft could be sacrificed—had to be, in fact, as his little tête-à-têtes with Moriarty meant that any wounds available for prying open or joys available for spoiling were no secret already—but it was no big loss. He put it in place on a small dessert trolley in the corner, settling the memories in and around the covered plates._

_Mummy’s patient attempts to teach him how to interact with others, yes; the schoolyard taunts that followed him all the way through to university, for what it was worth; the unrelenting boredom of a mind in disuse, definitely; drug history, obvious…_

_The work. Now that was a difficult one. Everything that Moriarty could know from an alternate source had to go in, but did Moriarty know the rush of triumph in solving a case? Obviously. But Sherlock was reluctant to put it all in; he honestly wasn’t sure what would happen to the memories left out here. Delicately, he feathered apart cases, teasing out the irrelevant information, some portion of the unexpected joy of the solution: Angelo’s effusive gratitude. The relief on Mrs. Hudson’s bruised face when he told her that she wouldn’t need to testify. Lestrade’s tired nod of reluctant admiration. Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary. The persistent, background echo of ‘brilliant!’ Those he packaged carefully and tucked out of reach._

_He added a fake wall across the back, and another in front of it; barely a wall, barely disguised at all, barely even worthy of the word_ screen _, given the filigree cutouts that might block details for a few minutes, but certainly couldn’t convince Moriarty to stop digging at something. He added several small closets to the room; too small to fit more than one or two memories or emotions into each, none of them with locks. It would be enough to exhibit the outward personality that his mind palace generally allowed him to assume, but would be more easily overwhelmed and overrun by the coming onslaught. Even this persona needed to_ try _to survive._

_Moriarty, he ensconced in a plaster bust at the landing of the sweeping double staircase that lead to the upper levels. That would appeal to the other man, he thought; he would expect to be a central focal point in Sherlock’s mind, and conceding that point early would prevent Moriarty from tearing the whole structure down just to make it so._

_Experimentally, Sherlock closed the doors to the main section of his mind, and abruptly the hall plunged into darkness. Cold fear and hopelessness began to flood like water from the base of Moriarty’s statue, which was growing in height, a dark figure merging with its plinth and stepping toward him as terror gushed down the stairs towards Sherlock. Wet to the knees, he struggled to one of the closets and forced it open against the rising pressure of water._

_“You could love me, you know,” said the statue casually, voice given resonance by the echoing hall, and Sherlock spun, frantic, because now it was_ right behind him _. “I would hardly even have to try…” and then hands were reaching out and touching him, made of cold iron now, sliding around his throat, strangling him as the water rose to his chest. Sherlock screamed, pulling and pushing at Moriarty with all his strength, heaving him bodily into the closet and slamming the door closed behind him, leaning on it with all his strength._

_The water receded._

_Heartrate decelerating slowly, Sherlock reopened the doors to the main section of his mind._

_No. The balance was wrong for this stage of the game. Moriarty would expect Sherlock to be cowed by this punishment, perhaps more than he’d expected, but he wouldn’t believe him broken yet._

_He deepened the closets, made them into small adjoining rooms with closets of their own; that would give him some more control. He changed the doors to open inward, so they would more naturally absorb some of his stress if he needed them, but it solved only part of the problem. The rooms were_ supposed _to become overwhelmed in time—that was their point—but not yet. This surface persona had clearly already reached breaking point._

_The weaknesses he needed to expose were mostly overwhelmingly negative, and in full sordid detail. With all the wounds there for Moriarty to pick open at his leisure, but without the full depth of background in Sherlock’s mind—with the most treasured, precious memories pulled out to protect them against Moriarty’s poison, even from the midst of things he needed to keep present, this could never work._

_Unfortunately there wasn’t that much capable of providing balance to choose from in the first place, none of it anything he was willing to lose. He glanced at the ornamental mosaic on the floor of the entry hall, calm and grounding in colours of grey and brown—but no, if there was one part of this room where Moriarty would focus his rage, it would be there. He couldn’t risk investing more detail into that. He wouldn’t._

_He would have to pull a great deal more of himself to the front, gamble the stability of his personality, assuming he ever got out of this alive…_

_Sentiment. A chemical defect found on the losing side._

_No, it_ had _to be John, that was the key. He’d fixed what he had to of him into the mosaic—afghanistan or iraq; (friend) colleague; how spectacularly ignorant he is; just so I know do you care about that at all; this is a turn up, isn’t it sherlock; (I don’t have friends) no, I wonder why; hostage, yes that works; you machine; (nobody could be that clever) you could; (goodbye, John) no, don’t, no, SHERLOCK; he’s my friend, he’s my friend, please... On careful observation, the scene of a battle resolved out of the subtle variations in the colour of the tiles: a doctor with one hand on the chest of his dark-haired patient, protecting him with his body as he aimed a gun at some distant figure, the sight line ending up at the bust of Moriarty._

 _Sherlock left the mosaic untouched. Moriarty would need to find_ some _part of John to vandalize and destroy utterly; but that didn’t mean Sherlock had to sacrifice him all._

 _Where could he put the rest of John, that Moriarty couldn’t find him, would never imagine to look for him? A place where even_ Sherlock _wouldn’t find him, couldn’t give him away?_

_He put the bust of Moriarty back into its position and gazed consideredly it, sunlight shining down from a high window onto one side of its face, shrouding the other in comparative darkness._

You could love me _, echoed Moriarty’s words in his mind, making him shudder, his throat feeling tight._

_It was five more minutes before Sherlock tried closing the doors again—and this time the lights stayed on. Moriarty’s statue stayed motionless plaster. It was still armless, but now rather than just part of the shoulders, the bust showed the man’s Westwood suit and tie nearly to the navel. Sherlock’s nervousness swelled, but he allowed it, forcing himself not to push the feeling away just yet. A faint, almost subliminal echo underpinned the silence in the hall._

_Tentatively, Sherlock poked at the troublesome memory from last time, getting a brief technicolour flash of terror that made his throat close over… but the rhythmic echo held strong. Thump-THUMP. Thump-THUMP. Sherlock’s anxiety peaked, stayed steady for a moment, and then began to recede on its own. He had found the equilibrium point._

_He took one last look around, reached his hand to touch the chest of the bust and feel the throb against his fingertips, before he had to seal away his own knowledge of John’s location. Thump-THUMP. Thump-THUMP. Thump-THUMP. It was perfect; the one place it was guaranteed that the other man would never—could never—think to look._

_Moriarty already knew it was hollow._

_He locked the doors._

_***_

Awake. John’s hand in his. Safe.

Scent: familiar fabric softener. His own shampoo. Fresh baked bread and yesterday’s tuna salad: sandwich shop. A faint burnt carpet smell. Deduction: Baker St. His room. Safe.

Consult recent memories: ah. _Safe_.

He breathed deeply, taking in the moment, storing it carefully in the pool of a sunlight by a window in one of the less damaged bedrooms in his palace: the smells of 221B Baker St, trays clattering in and out of the ovens downstairs, the pinch of pyjamas at his hips and riding up under his armpits, the rasp of his own sheets against his stomach, the familiar firmness of his own mattress, the distant honk of a taxi protesting a drunkard wandering on the road, the faint jeering response, the dim natural colour of morning sunlight through his eyelids …

Now would be a good time to sort some memories. John would be here beside him to ground him if he hit a trigger or flashed back, and unaware to interrupt him so he could focus.

But no. Sherlock had to admit that he didn’t want to disturb this pleasant moment of calm by returning to Moriarty’s prison, even in his mind.

Sherlock opened his eyes and rolled onto his side to observe John. Except for the outstretched arm that Sherlock had claimed as his own, he slept military style, trained to fit straight and neat into the comfortable centre of a narrow army cot. He seemed deeply asleep, but Sherlock had no doubt that if he started humming Reveille, John would be awake and standing at attention before he knew what had happened.

He couldn’t help but wonder if John would sleep differently beside a bedmate he had chosen; Moriarty had certainly sprawled possessively over Sherlock when, as the final proof of Sherlock’s helplessness, the man had allowed himself to actually sleep beside him. John would be respectful and tender to his partner, as tender as Moriarty had shammed in the full knowledge that his shallow pretence would never fool Sherlock. Would John feel that same urge to constantly _touch_ that had seemed to afflict Moriarty?

It didn’t matter. Sherlock wasn’t meant for that kind of interaction, it was clear.

In the months before his capture, he had occasionally wondered whether—despite his low libido and usual disinterest in romantic companionship—there might be something he was missing out on in not seeking a sexual relationship. Ordinary people seemed to spend so much of their time orchestrating their lives around the potential for sex; even John, who despite being an idiot was mostly more sensible than the general population. Perhaps it wasn’t as messy and intrusively physical as it seemed. (It had been.) Perhaps there was some kind of emergent property that he would understand when he experienced it. (There hadn’t been.) Perhaps it would turn out to be something other than a complete waste of everyone’s time. (It wasn’t. Even with nothing else but pain to look forward to for Sherlock, it had been tedious—and how much time had _Moriarty_ wasted on Sherlock, satisfying his own base itch?)

No, if there was one good thing to come out of his time as Moriarty’s captive, it was this. Now he knew for certain that he was asexual. Even the familiar release in which he had occasionally indulged on his own had become tainted in the hands of another person, made so discomforting by their very presence that it almost amounted to physical pain. There was no reason to try pursuing a relationship with… anyone.

He added the sleeping John into the peaceful patch of sunlight in his palace: his head burrowed into the pillow, eyes closed and mouth a little open, grey-blond hair unsettled, faint stubble peppering his chin… hand in Sherlock’s, relaxed and pliant in sleep, skin dry and warm.

Sherlock had the strangest urge to bring that hand to his mouth, to map out the fingertip callouses against his lips and tongue, learning the subtlety of texture and taste.

No. John wouldn’t understand the intellectual curiosity that might have prompted such an action. He would probably think of it as sexual in nature, and that could cause problems.

John had tried to cover it, but he had obviously been extremely disturbed to find that Sherlock had cushioned his experiences in Moriarty’s den by filtering them through aspects of John’s unique ability to pass into Sherlock’s personal space and put him physically at ease. _Before_ , John had been able to retrieve Sherlock’s phone directly from his pocket without making Sherlock uncomfortable, apart from an unusual spreading tingle against his skin and a not-unpleasant acceleration of the heart. The result had been so spectacularly unexpected that Sherlock had needed to repeat the experiment numerous times to verify. Sherlock couldn’t imagine that had changed; he’d only been gone for eight months, and John seemed almost the same as always. Perhaps it would be worth running the test again in any case.

Mentally extending John’s unquantifiable special access on to Moriarty had neatly sidestepped at least some of the conditioning. It had, of course, made Moriarty’s touch less generally invasive and thus made the trauma inflicted at his hands less effective in its goal of breaking Sherlock’s spirit. But more importantly, it had funnelled the mercy away to where it was only to be expected, so that he wouldn’t become confused as to exactly who was the enemy.

John’s memory had pulled like an anchor in the heart of the storm of Moriarty’s abuse—not blunting the violence to his body, which was, after all, only transport—nor protecting him from the humiliation and emotional assault, which went only as deep as the surface layer of his mind palace—none of which Sherlock could imagine in any way associated with John. What it did was to ground the impact of the relief, the gratitude, the comfort, the pleasure, and the craving for contact, which more naturally fell on him than Moriarty, and were by far the more damaging in the long run to misassociate.

And, since its source had been the memory of _John_ , Moriarty’s actions had been unable to tarnish it. It had continued to hold him fast for the whole period of his imprisonment, making it more natural for even his fragile surface persona to submit unflinchingly to—and even seek out—Moriarty’s touch, no matter how sadistic or unsettlingly affectionate the other man had chosen to be.

Sherlock had expected John to be, if not flattered at his status as Sherlock’s protector, then at least not horrified.

It had to be the not-gay thing.

That was a big thing for John, being not-gay. Having never experienced sexual attraction for himself, Sherlock found it somewhat puzzling that ordinary people put so much stock in labelling their attractions according to such expansive buckets. No one liked or disliked all men or women; some were ugly, or boring, or possessed of a more than usually obnoxious personality. Some—mostly John’s girlfriends, as far as Sherlock could see—were all of the above. Surely it made more sense to say: this person was attractive to you… this one unattractive.

Sherlock was fully aware that he was unattractive to John. Even before Moriarty had wrought his work on Sherlock’s mind and body, John had been increasingly insistent on _that_ subject whenever the opportunity arose. Sherlock hadn’t realised that even what happened on the inside of his head could be considered an unwelcome advance.

He looked guiltily at the sleeping John in the patch of sunlight in his palace. Perhaps that was not good. Now that Sherlock had become aware that John expected him to keep his thoughts free of insulting implications as well, perhaps he should have avoided deliberately collecting and storing the kind of memories that he’d set at Moriarty’s very heart to draw the poison from his influence. But restoring and even expanding that collection might also produce an alternate source of support that would reduce Sherlock’s dependence and his intrusion into John’s personal space. Perhaps that was more important. Insufficient data: he couldn’t be certain.

John stirred, rolling over on the spot without changing position on the mattress, taking his arm with him as he went. Sherlock let the hand go, but left the memory untouched.

He was fully dressed by the time John woke properly, seated against the headboard, staring into his mind while his fingers flicked thoughts and memories into their appropriate slots, uprooting and following the connections through the cracked and crazed mirror-maze of warped and nightmarish memories, soggy plaster shards, and scattered debris that had become of the main section of his palace.

Sherlock kept John in his peripheral vision as he worked, watching the expressions cross his open face as his mind got going—apparently a slow process—contentment, confusion, concern, realisation, deeper concern, sorrow, resolve.

“Morning,” said John softly. Sherlock waited a deliberate minute before tilting his head in acknowledgement, keeping on working. “Did you get some proper sleep?”

“Yes.”

“No… problems with me being here?”

“No.”

“It actually did help?”

“Yes.”

John considered that for a moment, then apparently decided to take it at face value.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m… glad. Could you eat breakfast?”

“Fine.”

“Toast, I think is about all we’ve got. And I’ll put on some—” John broke off, looking sheepish.

Sherlock dismissed the palace and met John’s gaze. “You can say tea,” he said patiently. “Just don’t pour the kettle in front of me.”

“Nah, it’s horrible stuff,” lied John impishly. “I was going to say coffee.”

They shared a breathless grin.

“I’ll pick up some orange juice next time I go shopping,” said John, tossing aside the covers and stretching without apparent discomfort at Sherlock’s presence. Sherlock politely averted his eyes as his t-shirt rode up to his waist, even though it would have provided a valuable update to John’s appendicular history. “I should do that this morning, we don’t have much in—so, uh… maybe make a list if there’s anything in particular I should look out for. You’ve lost a lot of weight; you’re going to need regular meals for a while before you can go back to living on thin air and case files.”

Sherlock continued to breathe evenly as his heartrate accelerated at the very thought of John leaving him alone in the flat, holding his expression steady. “I’ll come along,” he conceded.

“That’d be handy,” said John, oblivious.

He followed John along the hallway to the bathroom, but let him go in by himself, making as if he’d intended to continue towards the living room. He doubled back as soon as the door had closed and sank to the floor with his back against it, listening intently.

Observation: quiet creak, the soft clunk of plastic coming to rest against porcelain. Trickle of water, four seconds in length. Deduction: John was dehydrated. Conclusion: the tea thing was going to be a problem.

Observation: three steps. Squeaking metal, gushing water, then change in pitch and dampening of resonance, water splashing into a pool, the rustle of cloth sliding on arms, splashes and the sound of flesh on flesh. (Observation: Sherlock was feeling dizzy. Water swirled around his ankles inside his mind palace. His fingernails dug into the floorboards.) Deduction: John had pushed back his sleeves to avoid them getting wet. Slapped wet palms on his cheeks to moisten his face. Deduction: John was preparing to shave. Moriarty had never been so careless. Conclusion: Safe. _Safe_.

Sherlock grasped the side of his head with one hand and pressed it into the door as hard as he could, pushing the panic into a random room in his palace which was already overstuffed with a jumble of unrelated memories and trying to close the door.

Warning: unrelated data. Result: unsuccessful.

The room sprung immediately open and the emotions spilled out a swirling gush, feeding back on the panic and deepening it with pain and despair. The water level rose perceptibly.

This was _unacceptable_. He was _safe_.

It was fifteen minutes before John emerged from the bathroom. Sherlock made it into the kitchen before the door opened, and was sliding bread into the toaster with shaking hands when John entered, bringing a wave of calm and relief along with him.

“All right?” asked John, giving him a look.

“Fine,” said Sherlock truthfully, seating himself at the table before his legs could give out.

He ate the toast that John slid across to him without comment.

As soon as they finished breakfast, John gathered his things ready for the promised trip to the shop. “I expect you’re looking forward to getting some air,” he told Sherlock cheerfully.

Sherlock wasn’t. On the contrary, the idea of being out among people, the claustrophobic press around him and the accidental touches and the overall not-Johnness made him feel faintly dizzy. The treatment he’d received at the hands of Moriarty’s underlings hadn’t been designed for him to tolerate the presence of anyone but Moriarty himself with equanimity.

But John would be looking forward to it.

Perhaps it would be all right, as long as he was beside John.

On the landing, Sherlock was on the verge of actually admitting that he couldn’t go through with it, if only so that he didn’t actually pass out on the doorstep when he couldn’t step out but couldn’t let John leave either, when he saw his Belstaff coat was waiting for him on the peg.

Sherlock paused halfway towards it to consider the familiar silhouette. No. This was not his coat. Moriarty’s men had torn that off him in small blood soaked pieces on that very first day of pain and humiliation eight months ago. Boring, really. Moriarty had wanted him naked and vulnerable. Obvious. He’d rarely been allowed clothes at all, let alone the coat. Even John had noticed that coat had made him feel strong and imposing. The coat had charisma. The coat had turned him from a drug addled freak into _Sherlock Holmes_. Of course the coat had needed to go.

It hadn’t even occurred to him until this moment, how much he had _really_ liked that coat.

And now there was a facsimile hanging on its usual peg. A year after he’d been given it in gratitude for solving a trifling matter of embezzlement, Belstaff had dropped the design and the company had since changed hands entirely. This was the old design even though it looked brand new. It even had the crimson-threaded buttonhole that had never made part of the public line, but had served as a private joke from the surprisingly non-idiotic manager who had engaged his services. Curious. Sherlock sniffed gently: it hadn’t been stored. Even in a sealed container, the faint smell of sewing machine oil would have been released from the fibres and dissipated quickly. Deduction: a coat that had been manufactured within the last month, more probably in the forty-eight hours since his rescue. Conclusion: someone had convinced Belstaff to make a brand new coat in a design they hadn’t made for two years, practically overnight, and then left it in his hallway. Query: who? And why? The only possible effect would be to make Sherlock feel...

Ah. Mycroft. Every now and then, the man would do something that would remind Sherlock that he wasn’t just a controlling, cake-eating busybody, poking his nose into everything because he couldn’t help himself, dutifully ensuring his brother’s little defence against boredom didn’t escalate again to the point where it would upset Mummy.

If Sherlock’s fingers petted the soft felt around the buttonholes unnecessarily as he armoured himself for the battle, well, perhaps he _would_ take the next case Mycroft brought him, even if it was unbearably boring as usual. He’d protest, of course. But that was what brothers did for one another, or so he understood.

“Ready?” asked John.

Sherlock turned up his collar. “Ready,” he agreed.


	5. Talking Points

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty talks about consequences, Sherlock talks about sex, and John gives Sherlock the talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter betaed and given a beautiful shine by the wonderful [Megabat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Megabat/pseuds/Megabat).

_After the doors were locked, Sherlock toyed with some implausible options for escape for a while longer—but he didn’t doubt that security would be significantly upgraded while he was confined, given how well this attempt had gone.  It was unlikely that the guards would be completely changed, but most of the weaker links would be removed, the weaknesses on the stronger ones identified and shored up.  Of course, assuming Moriarty didn’t actually want him to attempt escape again, Sherlock would emerge to find the doors had all been installed with physical as well as electronic locks, double-key entry, and lockout timers._

_There would be weaknesses in the system, of course, there always were.  But Moriarty wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to bait him again.  Sherlock had won this round—now the game would change._

_Eventually Sherlock had to admit that there was nothing more that could be done to fight Moriarty inside his head, which was when impatience for battle began to make it more and more difficult to put the current situation out of his mind._

_The next ten minutes, he occupied by deducing the exact composition of the sensory deprivation tank._

_It was certainly glass walled and lidded, of course, for ease of observation, most likely double-glazed to minimise sound transmission as a back up to the earplugs.  Filled to the lid to minimise waves; water with a high concentration of magnesium sulphate for neutral buoyancy.  After a brief moment of vertigo, he decided that he was reclining nearly horizontal.  The bonds holding him in a star shape were firmly padded, diffusing the pressure.  Attached to elastic ropes, he decided after a moment testing them.  Enough give in them to muffle the sensation of pulling, just enough to smooth out movement and blur awareness of when it started or stopped, but not enough to allow any part of his body to reach or touch another.  A blackout facial mask, obviously, and probably very low light in the room beyond to reduce the potential for light leakage.  The bit of the breathing mouthpiece fitted between his teeth, cushioning them from grinding and preventing him from biting his tongue for the stimulation.  A few facial calisthenics deduced the exact structure of tape holding it in place.  Even a form of glove apparatus encapsulated each hand to spread his fingers, similarly for his toes.  The almost imperceptible drift of his hair away from his face, minimising contact, put the water filtration inlet at his feet and the outlet behind his head.  Moriarty’s attention to detail truly was extraordinary._

_Bored, bored,_ bored _._

 _Sherlock tried practicing the fingering for Elgar’s_ La Capricieuse _, but without the ability to do more than faintly twitch his fingers, or hear the result, he barely lasted to the end of the piece.  He moved on to torturing his imaginary violin with random squawks and groans, but that was even less satisfying without the sound._

_Devising experiments was of little use without any new information to stimulate curiosity, and ultimately a dead end without the ability to actually determine the results.  Re-examining cold, unsolved cases only resurrected the frustration of lacking data that had caused him to admit defeat in the first place._

_He tried some exercise, naming and repeatedly tensing each muscle in his body individually, pulling on the ropes repeatedly until he could feel the soreness.  His mind ached at the tedium until sleep finally claimed him.  It was almost refreshing to let himself drift in and out of consciousness long enough to catch up on the sleep deprivation of the past weeks.  Never knowing whether you were going to wake up to a taser or a kiss—and being even less certain which was preferable—made one jumpy and hampered the tendency to linger in a morning doze._

_After twenty-four hours, even sleep wasn’t much of a respite._

_He’d run out of ideas, so he ran the ones he’d had again.  Escape plans.  Tank.  Violin.  Muscles.  Sleep.  And again.  And again.  And again._

_Then he lost track of his body.  Intellectually, he knew it was somewhere in the tank with him, but he couldn’t find it, and after a while Sherlock began to wonder if maybe he was dead.  Maybe a million billion years had passed and the world had crumbled to dust while he remained fixed on this spot.  How could he tell, after all?  There was no way to gather experimental results._

_Three hours into the third day, Sherlock began to scream without pause or awareness, the sound swallowed up completely by the air mask and only the vibration of his skull and the tearing rasp of his throat hinting that he was more than a disembodied consciousness.  Eventually it died down to convulsive sobs and the taste of blood in his mouth._

_Then the hallucinations started._

_That was good, because at least they were something different.  But bad.  Sherlock couldn’t quite remember why they would be bad.  John’s oatmeal jumper refused to make him a cup of tea because it had no hands, but cheerfully batted Sherlock’s disembodied self away into a wobbly circular orbit around the moon—no, it was the sun—no, you see but you don’t observe; it was a mulberry bush.  POP!_

_The water thickened with blood and the smell of chlorine and Semtex.  John’s head floated in front of him, blown clear of the vest, bloodied and smiling in exasperation, and the flesh melted away until all that was left was the skull from the mantelpiece, parroting, “Gottle o’ geer, gottle o’ geer,” and Sherlock... wasn’t there anymore._

_It was four days before Moriarty opened the tank._

_Sherlock lay near-insensate, hardly comprehending his return to the outside world as the dark haired man released his bonds and peeled off the apparatus._

_Moriarty half-pulled, half-lifted the blinking, semi-catatonic man out of the water onto shaking legs.  Unsteady as a newborn giraffe, Sherlock tried to remember how to operate limbs that didn’t even feel like they were in the same room.  Moriarty pulled Sherlock’s arm over his shoulders, supported him across the room onto a bed whose thousand thread silk cotton sheets felt like sandpaper, hid Sherlock’s face in the hollow of his shoulder as the sudden explosion of sensory input overwhelmed him, softly soothed his trembling, naked skin with caresses that burned like clinging fire._

_“If you try to escape again,” Moriarty murmured, and the barest puff of his breath exploded like a concussion grenade in Sherlock’s ear, “or if you_ ever _make another attempt to harm_ me _…”  The fingers at his throat felt like the weight of a collapsing building, but Sherlock’s limp body didn’t even struggle for air as Moriarty pushed him down into the mattress and stole a long, agonising kiss.  “…the immersion time will be doubled.”_

_Sherlock stared up at the ghost of a bruise staining Moriarty’s cheek, the merest fraction of anything he himself had worn in the last few months._

_Moriarty smiled strangely, his pupils dilated as wide and black as the abyss._

_Then—cooing sympathetic endearments, implacable in the face of the overstimulated agony that blossomed at his every touch—Moriarty tenderly divested Sherlock of his virginity._

_Restraints were no longer necessary.  Sherlock didn’t try to break out again._

***

The next three weeks passed very slowly.

Sherlock was… not himself.

Oh, he was amazingly together, given what he’d been through.  He alternated between flouncing around the flat, as rude and insufferable and demanding as ever, and spending hours on end in unlikely positions on the couch, uncommunicatively ensconced in his mind palace.

He’d only had two more flashbacks that had required John’s intervention, both of them quickly under control almost as soon as he had approached Sherlock with intent to draw him out.  He’d put on almost fifteen pounds under John’s watchful eye and, while he was still thin, he had lost the pinched look of someone on the edge of starvation.  His stitches were out, his bruises faded.  He was Sherlock Holmes once more.

Mycroft had asked them both to stay clear of Scotland Yard and anyone in it until he had a chance to clear Sherlock's name.  It would apparently take time because he’d been caught flat-footed by the surprise of Sherlock’s return—Sherlock’s snide remarks made that abundantly clear, despite his uncustomary compliance with his brother’s request—and although he had been planning to clear Sherlock’s name at some point, it had taken a back seat to avenging Sherlock’s death.

After only a week back in Baker St, Sherlock had begun to grow so bored of the apparently tedious work in his mind palace that he started getting destructive.  In the absence of a crime to solve, John had begged—actually begged—Sherlock to find something gruesome to experiment on to take his mind off it for a few hours.

He’d overridden Sherlock’s petulance and dragged him to the morgue at Barts, only to find a new pathologist who’d never heard of Sherlock Holmes.  The man had frowned at the request for any spare livers he happened to have lying around, but had eventually given in under the strength of a five minute blistering chain of deduction about the state of his marriage, relationship with his parents, and the biological fatherhood of his children.  John had needed to send Sherlock out of the room so that he could apologise and thank the man, complimenting him on his beautiful children—who looked just like him, honestly, don’t listen to that tosser—as he stiffly loaded livers into a biohazard bucket.

It was situation normal again; everything John had missed, and hadn’t missed, about living with Sherlock.

Given what John had feared when he’d first seen the state Sherlock had been reduced to in Moriarty’s dubious care, it was nothing short of miraculous.

John had removed his gun from the flat, of course, as a precaution, even before Sherlock had started growing bored.  He’d given it to Stumpy for safekeeping when he’d come by the flat to express his regrets at John’s removal from active duty, check he was okay, and also—once he’d recognised the near-still form of Sherlock in his pyjamas on the couch and clarified that he was in the midst of his mind palace, not a seizure—deliver a reprimand.

“John,” he’d hissed, “you were _fantastic,_ running that mission.  The target was clearly unstable, and who knows if we would have all got out in one piece and the hostage to boot if you hadn't managed to take out those snipers.  But I cannot believe you thought it was okay to take over negotiations without even warning us that the hostage was your _partner_!  I was trusting you would make sure Mr. Holmes didn’t put us all at risk protecting his brother, but I never expected _you_ to value our lives so lowly.”

“I'm not gay,” said John wearily.  “Sherlock’s my flatmate. And my friend.  We’ve never been like _that_.”

No matter how much John might have wondered if…  Well, that had been once upon a time when Sherlock was only _dead_ , not… so complicated.  Now, it was completely out of the question.  

“But I’m sorry, you’re right,” he conceded, feeling guilty for the almost-lie.  “I _was_ emotionally compromised by finding him alive, and I should have warned you.”

“Oh, right,” said Stumpy looking relieved.  “That makes more sense. A friend’s okay, we’re all _friends_ , and we still get the job done. I just—well, when I saw him here dressed like that and put it together with the way that psycho talked to you, I thought... Sorry. Glad I don’t have to give Parker the bad news, anyway.”

He gave John a knowing look, which John returned flatly. Juliet Parker hadn't been entirely subtle in her admiration for John, ever since he’d beaten her to taking out that drug dealer in their first mission. It was flattering and, in other circumstances, he would certainly have returned it with interest, but... well, she was a nice girl. An excellent shot, with a wicked sense of humour and legs that went on forever. And she deserved better than John Watson's hang-ups.

“You still get to buy the beers on Friday for pulling that stunt on us though,” said Stumpy.

“Glad to,” said John.  He glanced at Sherlock.  “Might have to rain check it though.  Not sure if I can make it for a while.”

“I’ll hold you to it, believe me.  So any idea when you’ll be back with us?”

John shrugged.  “I really don’t know,” he said.  “Could be any time, might be quite a while, but… to be honest, I can’t see my current assignment lasting long term.”

“Well, we’ll keep your spot warm for you,” said Stumpy. He eyed the silent, twitching form of Sherlock.  “Are you sure he’s okay?”

“No,” John had said truthfully.  “But I’m not convincing him of that anytime soon.”

Because however fine Sherlock acted, with however much enthusiasm he had plunged back into the normality of life at Baker St, there were edges to his act.

It was unnerving to see the way Sherlock meekly ate or drank anything John put in front of him.  To see him pause for a fractional moment, apprehensive, before passing through a doorway.  The hastily caged note of fear in his eyes whenever John left the room, even for the smallest thing.  The way Sherlock tried to hide the fact that he’d clearly been panicking the entire time John was gone.  The way sometimes the sight of John swatting at a fly would make Sherlock flinch, or scratching an itch on his neck would make Sherlock dart forward to grasp John's hand in both of his and press it to his lips while he breathed evenly for a minute, and then abruptly let him go, pretending it hadn’t happened at all.  The way he slept, curled defensively and clutching John’s hand in his sleep.  The nightmares that he obviously didn’t think John knew about—although how he imagined John could sleep through the death grip Sherlock maintained on his hand, John had no idea.  A couple of times he’d almost given up on feigning sleep so he could draw him into a hug and tell him it would get better—trust me, I know about nightmares—to hell with Sherlock’s pride.  But the other man put so much effort into breathing quietly over the hitch in his throat, trying not to wake him, that John wasn’t sure of his welcome.

Because that was the other issue.  Sometimes when Sherlock looked at him…

John had seen the look of adoration Sherlock had directed at Moriarty in the railway station.  It had been the creepiest damn thing about the entire day, and given how creepy Moriarty tended to be even when he _wasn’t_ proudly showing off his sick handwork, that was saying something.

He was very glad that Sherlock had realised it would be necessary to actually explain that he’d tied some kind of knot in his brain linking Moriarty with John, to help himself cope.  Why Sherlock thought that it was better to convince himself he was being abused by his best friend than his worst enemy, John had no idea.  But even if John didn’t understand how, or why, at least he understood that in Sherlock’s mind, he wasn’t just a ventriloquist’s dummy wrapped in Semtex acting as Moriarty’s voice, but the actual star of the show.  

He wasn’t sure how he would have reacted to seeing that look of adoration directed at _him_ if he hadn’t known that.  He still wasn’t sure how to take that look.  How to take the fact that Sherlock seemed to want John here at all, given at one time he’d apparently stood in for Moriarty at his worst.

But that was the point: Sherlock didn’t _want_ John here.  He just _needed_ John.  Or thought he needed him, to fill a gap left by a psychopathic raping bastard who’d toyed with and manipulated Sherlock until he couldn’t even remember the way that he’d never needed anyone before.

It was fortunate, given that Sherlock seemed to find it difficult letting John even go to the bathroom unattended, let alone have a walk to clear his head, that Sherlock was spending so much time in his mind palace, unmoving and unspeaking, trying to clear his own head.

It gave John some much-needed privacy to process it all.

John had spent enough time in therapy to know the techniques, even if Ella hadn’t always agreed with his application.  He was sure she wouldn’t have agreed with _this_.  Sherlock should have space and time for healing, she would have said; he would need to come to terms with what had happened before it could be beneficial to confront his attacker, or he would risk falling into old patterns.

John knew all about the cycle of abuse.  He’d done his residency in Emergency.  Even at twenty-five, he’d been the short, safe, unthreatening doctor in the woollen jumper who would be just the person to treat Mrs. Reynold’s latest sprained wrist and black eye—just clumsy, I guess—to give her a cup of tea and have a quiet word about the support available and that, if she ever felt ready to seek help she should ring the number on this card—yes, what a coincidence, that _does_ seem to be the number I asked you to memorise while testing for concussion.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Mr. Reynolds—or his equivalent—would be waiting in the hospital lobby, with flowers and a charming smile and empty promises.  John knew the helpline card wouldn’t even make it out of the front doors before it went in the bin.  He’d learned to perform that concussion test even if there clearly wasn’t a head wound.

John _knew_ that look.  The way the tightness of anxiety softened to pathetic relief and gratitude at the sight of an abuser who wasn’t currently in a bad mood.  He hadn’t learned it in Emergency, he’d merely come to understand it there.

He knew it from his own mother’s face.

John knew he’d inherited his father’s temper, even if Harry had got the alcoholism, and he’d _promised_ himself that if he ever saw that look directed at him, he would walk away, right that moment, and he would never return.

Of course, this was different.  John and Sherlock weren’t a couple.  And it wasn’t actually John who had hurt Sherlock, but… well, it seemed that Sherlock had done a bang-up job of convincing himself that it was.  And that meant the way Sherlock was clinging to him wasn’t the healthy support of someone leaning on a friend, a cry for help from someone who didn’t want to be alone after a terrible experience.

It was _John_ who was perpetuating the cycle in Sherlock’s mind, standing in for Moriarty and keeping Sherlock waiting on the edge for when the next blow would fall even after the bastard was dead.  He really _should_ walk away; it would be best for both of them.

But Sherlock had asked him to stay.

John had never been good at saying no to Sherlock.  And Sherlock _was_ improving.

It had been two weeks since the last flashback where John had needed to intervene.  The last few times John had had a shower, he was fairly certain that Sherlock actually had stayed in place the whole time John had been out of the room.

Whether he was actually getting better or simply getting more capable of hiding his responses as he ‘repaired’ his mind palace, John didn’t know.  How much longer would Sherlock need John here, before he realised that he didn’t want him here at all?

Ultimately, that was up to Sherlock, because no matter his misgivings, as long as Sherlock asked him to be here, John wouldn’t leave him.

***

The next three weeks passed very slowly.

The damage to Sherlock’s mind palace was even more extensive than he had feared.  It had been dangerous to store so much of himself in the one room, fragile and unprotected, constantly immersed in the emotions that impaired his reasoning.  The gamble had paid off, but Sherlock was… more damaged than he’d hoped.  The memories of his time in Moriarty’s prison were too warped, too jumbled. The connections and cross-references they’d automatically built were too firmly intertwined and reinforced with the irrelevant details of his emotional state.

He’d hoped it would be the work of a few days—perhaps a week—to slot the unwanted emotions back into their boxes and begin sorting through the valuable data he might have picked up during his time with Moriarty.  In fact, after three weeks work patiently unwinding connections, following them from one place to another through his palace to individually uproot each one, it was barely possible to see the progress.

It would almost be easier to simply release everything at once, strip the connections wholesale and start again, but… no.  That wasn’t an option. Sherlock knew what would happen if he became overwhelmed, and...

Well. There was simply no need to go there again, was there?

Things were getting better, however slowly.  He’d made time to properly clear out some of the jumbled rooms of his palace to help him retain his equilibrium, allow himself the capacity to abruptly shut down an unwanted reaction before it could cause more damage, even if it wasn’t a long-term solution.  But even that wasn’t perfect.

He’d been unable to stop himself from going into a rant at the pathologist who’d replaced Molly at Barts, his hands shaking and his lips spilling cruel deductions unchecked at this man who had the _audacity_ to stand in her place and deny Sherlock access.  The rage had shaken through his mind palace like an earthquake, knocking pictures off the walls, smashing ornaments, rattling locked doors ominously.

What a waste of a perfectly good resource her death had been; just a pawn sacrificed in Moriarty’s infantile game to ensure that she couldn’t give away the truth of Sherlock’s survival.  She hadn’t just given Sherlock access to the bodies he’d needed for cases, she’d actually kept an eye out for anything interesting.  That corpse with the two left feet last year, or the one that had been found in a sunken car that had plunged into a lake without anyone noticing for three months, or the one that had accidentally poisoned herself by messing with belladonna in her ridiculous garden of homemade homeopathic medicines.  Molly would let him know when there was something interesting to come in and see, delay releasing them if he was busy, turn a blind eye while he sneaked organs for a few days as long as he had them back in time for burial.  All that data, just in the hopes that he would come by and notice her.  

And then he _had_ noticed her, and he’d asked her, and she’d helped him again.

One last time.

He’d eventually managed to leave the morgue to cover his reaction, go out into the corridor and leave John behind to help package up the livers, while he watched through the glass and wished for a cigarette to occupy his hands.

The tantrum had undone three days patient sorting, rejumbling painstakingly separated feelings and memories, running over and reinforcing the connections he’d been trying to wipe away.

The entire process was frustrating.  Two steps forward, one step back.  Sherlock had always been able to depend upon his mind, always been able to control his reactions.  Losing that control had been the worst torture he’d had to suffer with Moriarty, but at least he’d always known he’d had the control to choose that course in the first place.  Now, it was simply out of his hands, and Sherlock was beginning to wonder if his mind would ever be his own again.

By the time Mycroft sent through the message that it was safe to visit Scotland Yard again, Sherlock felt about ready to crawl out of his skin, just to get away from the wreckage of his mind.

Within two minutes of the voice message interrupting breakfast—Mycroft still refused to text; Sherlock still refused to answer the phone—he had practically stuffed the struggling John into his coat, toast hanging from his mouth as Sherlock swept him out the door and into a taxi.  Twenty minutes later, he’d bulldozed his way through reception and into the Yard, and swept through the ranks of desks, ignoring the whispers and gasps as realisation rippled just ahead of him in the sea of shocked officers.

“Good morning, Lestrade.”  He strode into the man’s office, disregarding the growing ruckus and gawping faces he’d left in his wake.  “What have you got for me?”

Lestrade froze, bent over awkwardly with his hand half-reaching to the filing cabinet, completely still for a full seven seconds before he reanimated.  “Oooh, you bastard,” he said finally, turning to look properly.

“Yes, yes, I’m alive,” said Sherlock, impatient.

The ordinary minds did seem to get stuck on this point.  Mrs. Hudson had actually fainted.  Maybe he should have waited until tomorrow, when Mycroft had promised it would hit the newspapers, and let everyone find out first from there.

Maybe, if it hadn’t turned out that the whole thing had played into Moriarty’s hands, he might have considered this a triumphal return, relishing the shock and awe his brilliance inspired in the people who admired him most, celebrating as they appreciated the grand joke that he’d played.

But now the whole thing left a bitter taste in his mouth.  Yes, it had been a clever plan, but it hadn’t been _his_.  He’d just been another idiot dancing to Moriarty’s tune, along with everyone else.

He strode forward, hoping to hurry things along, or at least look through the paperwork on the desk while Lestrade’s brain processed the shock.

“You’ve been letting things slide, Graham,” he said.

“Greg!”

“Greg,” corrected Sherlock.

There was a pause, and then Lestrade came at him.

Sherlock was forced to sidestep what looked like an attempt at a hug, shooting Lestrade a look of mild horror, and then broadened it to Donovan and Anderson, who’d apparently followed him to the doorway of the office.  Donovan didn’t look like she’d be trying to hug him any time soon, thankfully, but Anderson—that was just disturbing—Anderson’s eyes were fever-bright, fixed on Sherlock like he was in the midst of a religious experience.  He actually looked close to tears.  Sherlock resolved to keep an eye on him.  From a safe distance.

Then John arrived between Sherlock and Lestrade, unassuming as always, looking like it was a natural motion for him to intercept the other man before he could actually touch Sherlock, and shake his hand while they grinned at each other and shook their heads at him like idiots.

Well.  It was only natural, Sherlock supposed.  They _were_ idiots.

“What have you got for me?” Sherlock interrupted the moment.  “I’ve jumped through all sorts of tiresome hoops to clear my name and be officially certified as a consultant to Scotland Yard.”  Well, Mycroft had, anyway, and he would certainly extract suitable payment for it.  “You can check my case file if you must be tedious, but it’s all in order.  I’ve been gone for eight months, you must be _drowning_ in unsolved cases by now.”

“You tosser,” said Lestrade, without particular rancour.  “You think you can just waltz in and pick up where you left off?  No explanations?”

“Yes,” said Sherlock.  “Obviously.”

Lestrade gave John a helpless look, getting a shrug in return.  “Alright,” he said finally.  “I’ll have a look.”

“Do,” said Sherlock, settling himself into Lestrade’s chair and helping himself to one of the open files on the desk and skimming through it.

Sherlock was frowning at a dubious witness statement when Lestrade returned and sidled up to John.  “So what’s the story?” he asked quietly, underestimating as always the range of Sherlock’s hearing.  “Where did he _go_?”

John glanced at Sherlock, before saying, “Mycroft.  Stuck him in witness protection.”

“And he _stayed_ there?”

“Well,” said John, shifting uncomfortably.  He always was an impossibly bad liar.  “Apparently there were snipers.  On you, me, and Mrs. Hudson.”

“Mycroft put _snipers_ on us so that Sherlock would stay in—” Lestrade spluttered.

“No, no,” shushed John as Sherlock carefully didn’t change expression.  Oh, he would be able to hold this over Mycroft for _months_.  “They were _Moriarty’s_ snipers.  That’s why he jumped.  Why he had to.  He was… it was for _us_.  To protect us.  And then he had to stay… there… until it was all over.”

“God,” breathed Lestrade.  “That’s… incredible.  Sherlock Holmes, hidden away somewhere living an ordinary life…  Must have been torture for him.”

“Yeah.”  John inspected his shoes.  “Torture.”

“Lestrade, did you even _look_ at this file?” interrupted Sherlock, before even Lestrade couldn’t help but see through John’s appalling poker face.  “A disappearance, bracketed by two housebreakings—only papers and family photos taken—and a series of domestic disturbances?  This man was obviously keeping two wives—or trying to—a secret from one another, but had to make one identity disappear when that wife found out.  You’ll find him alive and well at… 43 Trotter St, Surrey… with his unsuspectingly _not_ legal second wife, while the jilted first wife enjoys the attention of her lover—the neighbour who corroborated the story about the group of teenagers fleeing the scene of the housebreaking—and waits long enough to have her husband declared dead and claim the life insurance payout he arranged to keep her quiet.”

Lestrade gaped for a moment, then his eyes narrowed.  “I _knew_ there was something fishy about that neighbour, I just couldn’t pin it down.”

Sherlock snorted.  “Of course your sympathies would gravitate towards the bigamous husband just because one of his wives was cheating on him.  What a waste of time.”

“What, the case?  You’ve only been here five minutes.”

“No, _them_ ,” sneered Sherlock.  “All that time and effort, keeping lovers secret and playing house all over town.  Sex is a boring motive.”

“I’m sure they enjoyed it at the time,” said Lestrade with a smirk.  “It does have its rewards.”

“Even now I’ve tried it, I can’t see the appeal,” huffed Sherlock.

Lestrade coughed in a shallow attempt to cover a disbelieving laugh—Sherlock gave him a quelling look—but _John_ …

John’s mouth was moving soundlessly.  “You’ve—” he tried, then opened his mouth and shut it again.  He looked like a giant goldfish swimming endlessly in the same tank when he did that, and Sherlock just _knew_ the next words out of his mouth were going to be unbelievably patronising.  He folded his arms and glared, waiting for it…  

But John just took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly through his nose.  “Right,” he said.  “Are these the case files you wanted to give us, Greg?  All right if we take them home and look there?”

Lestrade looked between the two of them, realising that he’d missed something, but he rallied quickly.  “Yeah, okay.  Thanks for the tip, Sherlock, I’ll follow it up.  Let me know if you find anything more.  Pint soon, John?”

“Definitely,” said John fervently.

“I’ll let you know when I get an evening,” said Lestrade.  “Can’t tell you how good it is to see you alive, Sherlock.  I’m certainly glad not to have bullet in me, so… well, thanks.  I appreciate it must have been difficult.”

Sherlock conceded to that with a pleased nod.  Sincere and appropriate—no matter that the plan had been Moriarty’s, Sherlock had, after all, saved Lestrade’s life if he thought about it that way.

John fidgeted in the taxi all the way home, and the moment they got back upstairs in Baker St, he set to puttering in the kitchen, flicking the kettle on and then off again a few times, rearranging the mugs in the cupboard in an abortive tea-making urge.  Sherlock still hadn’t managed to convince him that it was safe to drink tea as long as he made sure Sherlock had some warning.

Eventually emerging victorious with two glasses of orange juice, John delivered them to the coffee table and sat in his chair, but then leapt up again to retrieve the paper.  He sat down to read it, but apparently couldn’t get comfortable, shaking out the pages and refolding them restlessly, as though that might help him focus on the words in front of him.

“Spit it out, John,” snapped Sherlock finally.  “What manner of spectacular ignorance will you be accusing me of today?”

“Sherlock, you haven’t _tried it_ ,” John burst out, throwing down the tangled mess he’d made out of the paper, the words tumbling over one another.  Clearly they’d been barely held back this whole time.  “At least certainly not with _Moriarty_!”

“I’m fairly certain that whatever definition of virginity you chose to use, that ship has sailed,” said Sherlock dryly.

“Not the most important one!”

Sherlock frowned at him for a moment, and then worked it out.  As a heterosexual male, John would obviously have heteronormative assumptions about male roles and dominance behaviour.  “I was required to act in an insertive role well as recepti—”

“That’s _not_ what I mean!  Do you actually believe that being forced to participate in your own rape by a sadistic monster is in any way equivalent to a mutual relationship?”

Sherlock eyed him carefully.  “You don’t think it’s a representative sample of sexual relations?  I think I’ve performed most of the common acts that—”

“No, it is certainly bloody not a representative bloody—”

John had leapt to his feet; thrown his hands in the air—an expression of frustration, Sherlock realised almost immediately—but it was too late, the motion too similar to the fast drawback of a hand in preparation for a blow.

Sherlock cringed—not turning away, nor trying to defend himself, never that—but bracing himself to accept it when it fell.

They stared at each other for a long moment, Sherlock’s cheeks flaming as he straightened again, and then John closed his eyes and took a deep breath.  When he opened them, what remained was a deep pity that made Sherlock’s embarrassment flash to rage.

John lowered his hands slowly, palms open and fingers spread as he sat down in his chair without breaking eye contact.  He kept his body language open, deliberately making himself unthreatening, folding the soldier away inside his woollen cardigan and his mild face and his idiotic brain.

“You do need to talk to someone about this, Sherlock,” he said quietly, “but maybe it would be better with someone else.”

“John, Moriarty _himself_ couldn’t break me,” snarled Sherlock, incensed, “you don’t need to treat me like a _weakling_!  So I don’t enjoy sex, that doesn’t make me a child!”

“I don’t think you’re weak,” said John without shifting his careful posture or neutral expression.  “You’re the strongest person I know, dealing with the most horrific experience I can imagine.  And I know you’re not a child.”

He paused for a moment, looking at Sherlock narrowly, before he continued.  “Look, you don’t need to enjoy sex, you don’t need to want sex, you don’t need to ever try having sex to know what you want or who you want near your body, that’s fine, it’s all _fine_.  But you _do_ need to understand that whatever you’ve experienced thanks to _bloody Moriarty_ —and I’m sure you don’t need to tell me he went through the book from cover to cover and wrote some new pages, too—it couldn’t possibly have included consensual sex, no matter what you did inside your head to help yourself cope.  If there wasn’t such a big difference between that and rape, what he did wouldn’t be considered a crime.”

Sherlock shook his head.  “It wasn’t as bad as you imagine.  Clearly, given the circumstances, it was technically rape.  But he wanted me to love him, remember?  He was trying to _seduce_ me.  As I grew more submissive, it amused him to hurt me more often, trying to get a reaction, but he was careful to keep cooperation the better option.  I didn’t fight him.  I rarely bled.  I was able to compartmentalise the situation and think of him as—” Sherlock glanced at John, “—a _friend_ , someone who _did_ have my consent to perform a necessary but unpleasant task.  He attended to me while he took his own pleasure even though I wished he wouldn’t bother.  Mostly, it was just _boring_.”

Sherlock had hoped this would reassure John, but if anything he seemed even more horrified than before.  He blinked slowly for a few moments to regain his composure before speaking again.

“Completely beside the point, Sherlock.  Sex is not about configurations of slots and tabs and the exchange of bodily fluids.  It’s about desire—physical desire, yes, but also about wanting to be close to another human being, so close you disappear into one another.  It’s... it’s exponential, right?  The more you want each other, the more...  Look, I’ve—” John paused, clearly embarrassed.  “I’ve slept with someone I didn’t really want.  It wasn’t a consent issue, I was just young, inexperienced, and I thought I could be who she wanted me to be when really I was just trying to avoid admitting it was over.  So I can understand that it could be boring when it’s all just mechanics, and I’m over the moon if you managed to disengage enough to feel bored rather than violated.  But with someone you’re choosing to be with—someone you like, or even someone you love—it’s completely different.  It’s like comparing a handshake to a punch in the face.  It may involve the same body parts, but how it feels is completely different.”

Sherlock slouched in his chair, feeling more than ever like he was getting another talking to from his parents over his latest infraction against the incomprehensible rules that normal people seemed to have installed as standard in their ordinary brains.

“You think I can’t understand it unless I have sex with someone I _want_ ,” he said resentfully.  “If it was that easy, I would have done that already.  But there’s only one person I’d ever even thought about like that before him, and…”

Well, the truth would be one way to make John back off on the subject, at least.

“… and she’s in witness protection,” finished John for him, just as Sherlock finally managed to say: “… and he’s not gay.”

“Wait, what?” said John, coinciding again with Sherlock saying: “Who’s in what?”

“Time out!”  John made a strange shape with his hands.  “Who are you talking about?  You don’t mean Irene Adler?”

Oh.  That was right, John had swallowed that ridiculous story Mycroft had cooked up to test if Sherlock had been involved in her ‘death’.  “No,” Sherlock sidestepped the matter.  “I think you’re confusing her desires with my reciprocation.”

“It’s not her desires that moped around the flat for weeks when you thought she was dead!”

“John,” sighed Sherlock, “do I or do I not play my violin, stop eating, and generally ‘mope around’ as you call it, whenever I’m working on a mental puzzle?  I don’t know why you insist on romanticising my intellectual curiosity over the Woman.  She was interesting.  So is a dismembered corpse at a crime scene, and only Donovan assumes that I want to actually engage in sexual intercourse with it.”

“Oh,” said John, taking a moment to assimilate that.  “I see.  So then.  He’s not gay.  This guy you… liked.  Which is fine.”

Sherlock felt an uncharacteristic urge to impact his forehead into the coffee table and complete today’s impression of a recalcitrant teenager.  “Please, John,” he groaned, “please, please tell me that one day we will be past ‘it’s all fine’.  Yes, I mean you.  No, it doesn’t matter.  Yes, you may continue to be a staunch bastion of heterosexuality, unassailed by any inappropriate implications even from within the privacy of someone else’s head, because whatever I may have once wondered, as it turns out I am _asexual_.”

“Look at us both,” muttered John, under his breath, almost too quietly to hear.  “Look,” he went on, “I’m not saying you should go out and have sex, that’s the last thing you…” but Sherlock hardly heard him over the buzzing in his ears.  He replayed the memory in his mind, treacle-slow, watching the sibilant, then the plosive form and resolve into a fricative.  Us both.  Look at us both.

Cross-reference: the Woman.  John kidnapped.  Following him.  Warehouse.  We’re not a couple.  Yes, you are.  I’m not actually gay.  I am.  Look at us both.

Cross-reference: John Watson.  Not gay.  Not gay.  Not actually gay.  I am asexual.  Look at us both.

Look at us both.   _Look at us both._

John was still talking.  Why was he still talking?

“John...” Sherlock interrupted, his voice oddly uneven.  “I was actually present for that conversation with the Woman.  I thought she was wrong about you.”

Although, in hindsight, that did seem naïve. Reading what people wanted—what they _liked_ , as she put it—was her job. A job that she was, despite her misstep with Sherlock, apparently spectacularly good at. Why would she have misread John, who was in most things almost pathologically open?

“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you to hear that.  Didn’t mean to say it,” said John, refusing to meet Sherlock’s gaze, his face radiating heat.  His hands twitched, trying to pull in from their open posture, but he kept them there.  “ _Unforgivable_ timing.  Please forget it.  Delete it.”

“I don’t think I should do that.”  There was a strange sort of panic fluttering in Sherlock's stomach, and the tightness in his throat had deepened, like there was a hand clutching it—but he was breathing fine.  His pulse was elevated.  There was a swelling feeling in his chest, like the moment he’d been pushed through a door and raised his head to find Moriarty still busy working, in a good mood; a gentle cue for a kiss and then a few minutes to bask in his aura of safety before the man’s sadistic focus fell completely onto him.  Why was he feeling like this?  John had barely even _moved_ , let alone accidentally cued him.  He wetted his lips.  “You may be right.  Some of my… conclusions may be based on inaccurate assumptions.  They might benefit from further research.”

“No, Sherlock, we are not having sex for an experiment,” said John, in a tired voice.  “I’m sorry, I know you want to understand, but sex with someone _else_ you don’t want isn’t going to put anything in perspective for you.”

Sherlock frowned at John.  John thought that Sherlock didn’t want him?  That he would find _John’s_ body as boring as Moriarty’s?  How could he think that Sherlock might not want every last piece of data on him that could possibly be collected by any means whatsoever?  John imagined Sherlock wouldn’t want to read each and every moment of his history in every smallest and most faded scar, his wrinkles and melanin distribution, his callouses and creases, and every unmarked inch of skin in between made interesting solely by the fact it was _John_?  To examine his bullet wound and confirm his deductions about the relative positions of the shooter and the angle with which John had used his body in an unsuccessful attempt to shield his patient from the line of fire?  To discover the taste of his navel and rank his smile-lines in order from deepest to finest?  John thought that Sherlock wouldn’t give anything—least of all spend an uncomfortable hour hyperaware of the _wrongness_ of his own body and the abnormal way it reacted to sexual touch—if it meant he could, even once, be trusted to touch John without limitation, not even his most private places declared off-limits, to observe his reactions to every caress and deduce what they meant, to be granted access and glut himself on that hidden side of John that he normally shared only with his brainless girlfriends?

John imagined that Sherlock wouldn’t want that, just because Sherlock didn’t happen to feel sexual attraction?  John really was an idiot.

There was definitely something strange going on in Sherlock’s chest.  Like the moment of expectation when Moriarty’s hands went around his throat and he could hardly breathe for _wanting_ , but _more_ —like it was also Christmas morning, and he was in his room before the rest of the house got up, just him and a stocking full of sweets.  Or maybe in a taxi heading to a locked room triple homicide with no apparent connection between the victims, and no sign of their heads.   And John by his side, already breathless with the anticipation of Sherlock's brilliance, admiration lining up on the tip of his tongue.

His face was hot.  His pulse was racing.  That tingle that slid over his skin whenever John retrieved an item from an inappropriately close pocket started behind his navel and spread down over his thighs.

His pupils, Sherlock realised after a moment’s consideration, were almost certainly dilated.

“I’m an idiot,” said Sherlock as, deep inside his mind palace a series of connections lit up, aligned themselves, and settled into place.

He’d thought he was experiencing a conditioned arousal response.  In the absence of any cues.  Which meant…  John talked about wanting to be so close to another human being that you disappeared into one another—romantic nonsense—but when you had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, must be the truth.  

This _wasn’t_ a conditioned response.

“John!  I’m an _idiot_!”

“Indeed,” said John, rubbing his face.

“No, I mean I'm not asexual.”  Was there a better word for it?  John-sexual?  “I want that.  With you.”

John’s eyes flickered over him, creased with grief as he shook his head.  “That’s not what’s happening here, Sherlock.  You’ve transferred this… _attachment_ Moriarty wanted to create over to me instead of him.  That’s all.  I’m sorry, that was my job to keep it separate.  It’s just hard when…  No, that’s not relevant.”

“I threw myself off a building to save your life,” said Sherlock, feeling like he was about to do it again.  “You don’t think I might have been somewhat attached to you before that?”

“And Mrs. Hudson!  And Lestrade!”

Sherlock waved his hand, batting the objection away.  “If it had just been one person, I might have worked out how to save them.  Three made it too complicated—but he only needed one.  And only you could have stood between us in my mind palace.  But John, you’ve _always_ said that you weren’t—”

“Look, we need to stop it here,” John cut him off.  “Another time, in other circumstances, maybe we’ll see.   _Maybe._  But there is _no way_ we are going any further with this conversation right now.  We need to leave even thinking about anything… _else_ …until you’ve finished undoing whatever voodoo you did in your head.  Completely separate me from him, and from what he did.  I need to be satisfied that you’re not just… clinging, as you called it, even a little bit, or going along with whatever it is you think _I_ want because that’s what he programmed you to do.  When you’ve finished sorting out your head, if you still want to talk then we will.  Right now, you’re my friend—my best friend—as you’ve always been and always will be.  Let’s just… leave it at that.”

John gave a stiff, determined nod, and Sherlock knew that there was no point arguing any further.

He didn’t even look at the files they’d brought home from the Yard.  He spent the rest of the day clearing rubble in his mind palace.


	6. Dead Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty makes a threat, Sherlock reaches breaking point, and John steps into Moriarty’s shoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am upping the rating to Explicit to be safe, but again it is not _precisely_ graphic. This chapter's italicised section is probably the most disturbing of the lot--all plot developments in the italicised section will be reiterated later, so if it gets too much you can choose to skip to the plain text and you'll miss a little bit of character development but still be able to follow what's going on.
> 
> This chapter brought to you, again, by the wonderful beta-reading of Megabat. :)

_They lay together in his bed, noses nearly touching.  Pillowtalk, Sherlock believed it was called.  Moriarty’s hand smoothed lightly over Sherlock’s body, soothing and unthreatening.  Safe._

_“Tell me a story,” said Moriarty.  His face was relaxed and open as he traced a fractal pattern on Sherlock’s chest, increasingly intricate as it grew.  “Tell me about your brilliant escape plan.”_

_“Escape plan?”_

_“Don’t play dumb, Sherly, I don’t like it.”  His fingers crested Sherlock’s shoulders as he spoke and began a slow walk down his spine, outlining each vertebra individually in whisper-soft looping trails._

_There were seven cervical vertebrae._

_“You impressed me—you know you did—the way you walked right past my baits and made your own security loophole, but then you made me punish you for it. It makes me almost sorry I had to clip your wings so harshly.  Almost!”  Moriarty gave him a quick kiss of apology._

_Twelve thoracic vertebrae._

_“Such pretty wings.  I want to know how else they’d plan to fly if they could.”_

_“I don’t have—”_

_“I’m booored!” whined Moriarty, then his childish expression flattened into something darker.  “You don’t want to let me get bored, Sherly.”_

_“There’s one of your men,” invented Sherlock hastily.  It would never work, nothing he had would_ work _, but the idea of Moriarty being_ bored _…  Sherlock shuddered internally.  “The Italian-trained ex-policeman?  Likes to play with electricity.”_

_Five lumbar vertebrae._

_“He doesn’t cinch the cuffs tightly enough; if I dislocated my thumb, I think I could wriggle free without him noticing.  He regularly turns his back while he’s waiting for me to recover from a shock.”_

_Five sacral._

_“I’ve been taking a little longer to look recovered than I really need,” admitted Sherlock._

_Moriarty hummed, amused.  “Naturally.”_

_Coccyx._

_Sherlock tucked his face into Moriarty’s neck, fighting against the urge to flinch away as the fingers finally reached their goal; feather-light at first, but unrelenting.  They rubbed, pressed, and then were gone for a moment, only to reappear cool and slippery.  They set to work: pressing, teasing, desensitising._

_“I could convince him I was unconscious,” Sherlock managed, “give myself time to get my bearings, and then I could take—ah!”_

_He abruptly lost the battle to stay still as two of the wriggling fingers pierced his body, familiarity doing little to ease the initial sting.  Sherlock was already cringing before the brutal slap landed; it split his lower lip against his teeth and impacted his face into the pillow._

_“_ Don’t _pull away from me, my dear; I’ve warned you before.”_

 _“I’m sorry!  Daddy,_ please _!”_

 _Real panic swelled in Sherlock’s chest despite himself and he forced himself to embrace the puerile nickname and beg forgiveness, cursing his moment of weakness.  It wasn’t just the thought of this island of respite ending before he’d even reached the chance for water, food or sleep; Moriarty’s men were_ malicious _when their break was cut short._

_“Please don’t leave,” he said, his throat half closed over with the fear.  “I’ll hold still, I promise.”_

_Without warning, Moriarty kissed him viciously, and Sherlock yielded, opening passively and letting him take whatever he wanted.  A sharp nip on his burst lip, however, warned him that this wasn’t enough and, heart thumping with the dread of his time with Moriarty being cut short, Sherlock attempted to return the kiss with everything he had, imitating and improvising as best he could to keep up._

_Moriarty pulled back to observe him for a long moment, licking Sherlock’s blood from his lips, and then nodded, as though granting a favour._

_“You only had to say you wanted a turn, my dear,” he said.  “I don’t mind.”_

_He rolled onto his back, pulling up one knee to expose himself, utterly comfortable in his skin, and tossed the lubricant to Sherlock._

_The tube hit Sherlock on the forehead and bounced off._

_“Oh, don’t be dull, Sherly,” said Moriarty, rolling his eyes.  “Just—” he caught his lower lip between his teeth, ingenuine as he ducked his chin and widened his eyes in an outrageously shallow caricature, “—be_ gentle _…”_

_Briefly, Sherlock considered the torturers waiting… then accepted the lubricant, and the punishment._

_“Now, do go on,” said Moriarty a few moments later.  “I’m—oh, that’s the spot; trust a violinist’s fingers—I’m_ breathless _with anticipation.”_

_“I could take out the ex-policeman easily,” said Sherlock meekly, trying not to think about his fingers, or what was to come, “even in a weakened state, using one of the electrode cables as a garrotte.  I’ve identified the door code rotation schedule, of course.  It had to be simple to allow the men who work for you to remember it.”_

_“We’re surrounded by idiots,” agreed Moriarty amiably, eyes half-closed, his face relaxed with pleasure._

_“So I could rest a few minutes, recover some strength, and then open the door.  If I was lucky, I might be able to take the guard outside by sur—”_

_Sherlock cried out in shock more than pain as Moriarty abruptly slapped him again, careless of their respective positions._

_“Luck, Sherly?” he snapped.  “That’s a ridiculous plan.  You’re not even trying.  Give me something_ real _.”_

_“Perhaps I shouldn’t care about trying to get away anymore.”_

_Sherlock hated that catch in his voice.  Hated that it wasn’t just from the repeated shock of the eye-watering blows.  He returned his focus to the careful work of his fingers for a moment, letting concentration on the unaccustomed task calm his jumbled feelings.  It wasn’t at all like playing the violin.  He’d once rummaged through the putrescent pockets of a partially decomposed corpse with his bare hands without flinching, under the horrified eyes of Scotland Yard.  He hadn’t even noticed the unpleasantness of that._

_“Perhaps,” Sherlock said, “I should just try to break your neck one day and let the guards kill me if they like.”_

_That was definitely getting too close to the truth.  He’d come a long way since his escape attempt, when he’d placed the hope of getting away over the opportunity of taking Moriarty into death with him.  Everyone already thought Sherlock was dead, after all; it wasn’t as though anyone would miss him.  And living like this?  This was… well, it was not good.  More not good than he’d anticipated._

_The torture was unbearable; the agony and the fear and the constancy of it, all marking time until Moriarty deigned to see him again.  But the time with Moriarty was, in its own way, even worse.  Moriarty delighted in inflicting emotional distress, much more than in hurting him physically.  It made him a much needed respite from the extremity of pain and deprivation that was his absence, but didn’t diminish the shame of feeling his body and—yes, even his mind, damn him—beginning to respond positively to Moriarty’s touch._

_Sherlock knew, intellectually, that he’d made adjustments inside his mind in order to temper some of the horror of Moriarty’s intimate touch and mitigate the consequences of the conditioning.  He knew that he’d limited his own access to his mind palace so that, however tempted he was to protect himself, he would deliberately and convincingly break ahead of his true capacity.  He knew that, however much he’d claimed the label, he had never been a sociopath and however much he tried to divorce himself from his emotions, he’d never completely eliminated them._

_But it was significantly more than disturbing to_ feel _those emotions flooding through his mind; constantly there, outside his control, unable to be completely locked away.  They knocked him off balance, making him feel weak and vulnerable, not just for a few minutes or an hour or two to go undercover, but_ always _.  It felt like the one place where he’d always been safe was betraying him, inch by inch, submitting and forming an attachment and following the path Moriarty had mapped out for it.  Even though he_ knew _that this was all, in fact, according to the plan of the self he’d hidden away under the surface, it felt…_

 _Felt.  That was the material point.  Feelings weren’t supposed to be this pervasive.  They weren’t supposed to control_ him _.  It wasn’t enough to be imprisoned and victimised on the outside; the feelings seemed to want to complete the job on the inside, eliminating the last of his free choices._

_The feelings were not good.  Not good enough that other not good feelings were beginning to feel like perhaps, in fact, his hidden self’s plan had actually been Moriarty’s plan all along.  Perhaps it was all just another trap, deeper again.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Perhaps his only way out, ever, really would be to…_

_“Hmmm, the martyr option,” mused Moriarty, amused again.  He licked his palm and reached down to grasp Sherlock, stimulating him quickly and efficiently.  Sherlock whined in distress but didn’t flinch away, earning a pleased smirk and a stroke to the cheek before Moriarty established a nauseatingly pleasurable twisting rhythm.  “Truth’s reward!  But I was right about you spending too much time with your little pet; you’re catching his diseases." His lip curled with hatred, the way it always did when he referred to John, his grip on Sherlock tightening briefly to just over the point of pain.  "You should already know that you want me alive.”_

_“I don’t want_ this _.”  Sherlock was horrified to find his vision swimming as the hateful ecstasy pooled between his legs._

_“I know that, love.”  Moriarty pulled him down by the throat and kissed him softly, smiling against his lips as he lifted his hand to brush the backs of his fingers almost reverently down Sherlock’s cheek.  “You wouldn’t be half as much fun if you did.  But it really doesn’t matter whether you want me or not, my dear; you won’t kill me, even if you could.  It’s not just you and your dear friends who’d suffer if anything happened to me.  Upsy-daisy now.”_

_Obediently, Sherlock shuffled over, letting Moriarty settle his legs around him like a cage, and pulling him into position, lining them up carefully, rubbing without pushing._

_“Whenever you’re ready,” Moriarty prompted politely._

_Sherlock bit his lip—an unconscious mirror of Moriarty’s earlier charade—and thought of the corpse again.  Perhaps if it had required an experiment; not just looking for the near-liquefied receipt that had disproved Anderson’s theory that the victim’s car had run out of fuel naturally, but some form of comparative test that would have made Donovan’s eyes bulge further to even hear about.  He would have done it, of course, if it had been necessary, and without taking pleasure or particular disgust in the act—although more probably without an audience.  Donovan would have had him arrested anyway, but that wouldn’t have mattered in pursuit of the solution._

_“Oh, you’re beautiful,” crooned Moriarty.  He was guiding the rhythm with his heels, his enraptured gaze on Sherlock’s face.  “We’ll be doing this again_ soon _, Sherly.  Just let me know next time you’re feeling sulky; you can have your turn whenever—oh!—you want.  Oooh, just like that, fucking_ perfect _.  It feels good for you, too, doesn’t it?  Powerful, yes?”_

_Sherlock couldn’t speak; he was focussed on the pattern forming out of the salt water droplets as they landed on Moriarty’s chest.  Would it be possible to deduce the motion of their source solely from the distribution?  Certainly the endpoints of the movement, the rate of acceleration and deceleration around them creating a standard distribution out of apparent chaos._

_“You wouldn’t be having such naughty thoughts,” said Moriarty, “about murder-suicide if I weren’t splayed open underneath you.  Vulnerable._ More _, now.  Fuck,_ yeah _,” he moaned, bracing his hands behind him on the headboard and meeting the motion as Sherlock obeyed._

_He looked no more vulnerable now than when Sherlock had held him over the side of Bart’s rooftop._

_“Did you know,” Moriarty managed again between non-verbal moans and gasps, “that you’re the only person alive who’s ever been inside me?  Doesn’t that make you feel special?  Usually, when I get the itch for a good reaming, I find someone I won’t mind killing straight after—plenty of choice there—just so they don’t start getting silly ideas.  You’re so sweet, though, I think I’ll keep you around. And you’re far too smart for me to have to worry about_ you _trying to kill me.”_

_Moriarty finally followed Sherlock’s gaze and deduced his abstracted train of thought, because he swiped his hand through the salty moisture, destroying the pattern of data points._

_“Focus, Sherly,” he said, bringing both hands up to clap against Sherlock’s wet cheeks and guide him into eye contact.  “This is important.  You see, I’ve been planning a really_ grand _funeral.  You know as well as I do that, once I’m dead, there won’t be a single person alive on earth who I’d care to keep that way.  There’s something quite liberating in that thought, isn’t there?  Freeing?”_

_Sherlock froze as understanding coalesced._

_“Oh, don’t_ stop _, darling!” laughed Moriarty fondly and dug his heels in again, forcing Sherlock to move, numb though he was with the creeping horror.  “That’s the whole point.  You’re stuck with me.  Because the only person who could ever have stopped me without killing me… was you.”_

_That night, they slept together for the first time, Moriarty's fragile body cocooned trustingly by Sherlock's._

_Sherlock’s pillow was wet by the time he fell asleep._

***

Awake.  John’s hand.  Safe.

Nightmare.  Action: analyse before deletion.

Analysis: essentially a true memory.  He was beginning to understand John’s continued insistence on the idea that consent may fundamentally change the nature of this particular act.  Doing—that—with Moriarty had been... unappealing.  And yet, despite the frustration the continued lack of progress on his mind palace caused, he’d fallen asleep the previous night musing with not-unpleasant curiosity on the idea of what the nature of such a moment might be with _John_ , not just a pale partial facsimile in a Halloween mask, but _truly_ with John.  

He’d devised several theories on the subject, and he looked forward to an opportunity to test them.  His hand on John’s arm had remained platonic; his thoughts certainly not so.

He’d given up on keeping those thoughts away out of respect for John.  Clearly, whatever he’d thought about John’s feelings on that subject, he’d been mistaken.

What exactly his feelings were, though, Sherlock couldn’t tell.  John had insisted, these last two weeks of slow and interminably tedious work trying to tease apart the disorder in his head, that they couldn’t even mention the elephant that had loomed large in the room since the conversation they’d _almost_ had.  He had stonewalled all Sherlock’s attempts to raise the subject, retreating into absolute careful formality whenever it came up, reacting to none of his probes, and meeting his one attempt to provoke a reaction with a look of such obvious contempt at his efforts that Sherlock had desisted from further endeavours.  But nonetheless, Sherlock couldn’t put it completely out of his mind.

Was John really gay?  Or not-gay?  Or not-not-gay?  He hadn’t said.  Sherlock had never been good at working out the subtleties of such things. Observation and deduction was a blunt instrument in the face of the complexity of people's thoughts and desires, and he'd always lacked the instinctive feel for it that would have let him intuit the meanings behind his deductions with an eye to anything beyond basic psychology. That was The Woman's specific plane of expertise—one of the things that had made her so interesting—but he could hardly ask her opinion on the matter

John's manner when confronted on his mumbled aside had instantly confirmed Sherlock’s hypothesis that there was _something_ there, something that he’d hoped would be reciprocated and been disappointed to find Moriarty in the middle of, but what was it?  Was it sexual?  Was it merely platonic?  And when had John become aware of it?  Had it been there all along?  Had his ‘death’ made John re-examine their relationship?  Was it that seeing Sherlock with Moriarty had awakened his awareness of Sherlock as a potentially sexual being?  Had he been jealous?  Sherlock added the question to the increasingly long list he’d been collecting to ask John when he finally allowed the subject to be reopened.

As for the information content of the memory...

“Nnnngh, Sh’lo, y’okay?”

Sherlock’s eyes slammed open, white-knuckled grip on John’s arm tightening for a long moment before he regained control and forcibly relaxed his hand.

“Call Mycroft,” he said, rolling out of the bed and fumbling for his dressing gown.  He pulled aside the neck of his pyjamas, examining his shoulder for the scar of the bite mark that he remembered as muffling Moriarty’s eventual climax on that night.

John made an unintelligible mumble of protest, but Sherlock ignored it, ripping back the coverlet to expose the other man to the slightly chilled air of the flat, ensuring he wouldn’t easily go back to sleep.

“Sherlock!  What the hell?” demanded John, awake and furious.  “It’s… _three a.m.!”_

“Call Mycroft, John.  Right now.  Wake him up and get him over here.  Tell him that Moriarty had a dead man’s switch.”

***

Sherlock lay like a statue in his accustomed thinking position on the sofa, three nicotine patches on his arm despite the weight he had lost and having completely detoxed under Moriarty’s dubious care.  He showed no sign of having heard the knock on the door, nor of noticing John heading downstairs to usher his brother and Anthea in, but he nonetheless started talking the moment Mycroft entered the room.

“You will need to issue alerts to all departments for a credible terrorist threat.  I cannot be more specific at this point; in all likelihood there will be a number of seemingly unrelated threats from crime syndicates and terror cells worldwide.  Only the suicidal would knowingly participate in the whole of his plan, but it is most likely that he has given each of his contacts a smaller job which, when pieced together, culminate in his intended result.  If you step up monitoring and analysis of their movements, we are more likely to be able to identify his first moves and anticipate the intended outcome.”

Mycroft nodded permission to Anthea, who silently acknowledged the instruction without raising her eyes from her Blackberry.  The two had seated themselves in the armchairs without a word or a sound while Sherlock was speaking.

“Any information we can gather to confirm Moriarty’s contacts or identify their movements since his death will help me to synthesise my own deductions.  I will need data, and I will need to instruct your staff on what to look for when sifting through it.”

Mycroft nodded silently again and John realised with a slightly creepy feeling that even the sound on Anthea’s Blackberry had been turned off.

“I cannot precisely date the encounter when I received the information, but judging from the timeline I have so far determined and the state of an injury I received at the time, it must have been at least three months ago but no more than five.  However, I imagine that I would not have risked Moriarty’s life on an escape, let alone executed him myself unless I knew of an opportunity to derail his plans.

“Unfortunately, I could not have anticipated the effect that his death would have on me.  My mind palace was essentially being held together by sheer force of will towards the end of my time there, and killing the man that has been its sole focus over those eight months has triggered the catastrophic collapse of that entire section and substantial damage to the remainder.  It would take far too much time to sort through everything individually and make repairs, certainly more than we have at the rate I’ve been able to go.  I will have to do this the hard way.”

“Sherlock,” said John, ignoring Mycroft’s warning look, “you can’t blame yourself for taking time to work through traumatic memories.  You’re doing very—”

“I don’t have _time_ to sob into your hanky, John,” snapped Sherlock, opening his eyes and glaring at John, pale irises just a thin line around pupils blown wide with nicotine.  “Not when I am the only one who knows what Moriarty’s plan is, how to stop it, and whether it involves plunging the entire planet into nuclear winter!”

John felt the blood drain from his face.  He dropped into a chair before he could fall.

“Yes, John, you finally comprehend.  Moriarty described it as ‘liberating’ to know that no one he cared about—as if he were even capable of that—would be alive to see the result of his ‘grand funeral’.  Obviously, this plan is something that could harm or kill _anyone_ alive.  Even more obviously, if it was something that he couldn’t hide from even with his resources, even knowing _precisely_ what it was that his death would set in motion, then every man, woman and child on this planet is in grave danger.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Cheer up, John,” said Sherlock seriously.  “Moriarty never liked to be obvious.  Besides, he will certainly lead up to the big event with a number of... omens.  He was always fond of drama.  I believe we still have some time.  Now, do shut _up_ and allow me to think.”

John remained soberly silent until dawn brought a procession of men with file boxes to the front door.  He exchanged quiet words with them, securing promises of their silence before allowing them upstairs to stack the boxes against the wall.  Mycroft and Anthea had left to begin work on Sherlock’s information after an hour or so, but John kept Mycroft updated via text message regarding several deductions Sherlock had made in the intervening time.

At nine o’clock, Mycroft’s staff picked up their substantially rearranged file boxes again and took them away to filter through the information according to Sherlock’s instructions.

When John returned upstairs from letting them out, Sherlock was sitting up, carefully peeling away the nicotine patches from his arm and replacing them on their backings.  “Now, John,” he said, without looking up from his task, “I will need your help.  I am finished with the data currently available. Further information will need to come from my sealed memories.  I do not have time to pick through them carefully one by one; I will have to burst open the seals, strip the connections, and start again.”

“What does that mean?”

“Do you remember Baskerville?”

Did he remember...  “Specifically?”

Sherlock’s lip curled.  “My overreaction to the emotions the drug stimulated.”

“You felt frightened and confused and out of control, and you tried to make me feel the same way so that you could observe me and understand your own feelings.  First by lashing out at our friendship, then by taking advantage of my trust in an attempt to administer an unknown psychotropic drug and conduct a cruel, unscientific, and above all completely unnecessary experiment on me.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows.  “A surprisingly apt analysis.  I hadn’t realised you were still upset by that.”

“I gave notice to Mrs Hudson when we got back.  It took her over a week to convince me to stay.”

John watched Sherlock very carefully as he said this, but the reaction would have been obvious even if he hadn’t bothered.  The horrified shock that transformed the other man’s features stayed for over a second before it smoothed out again, leaving just a faint tightness in his eyes.

“I did apologise,” he said petulantly.

“No, Sherlock,” sighed John, “you didn’t.  But that’s beside the point.  We need to stop Moriarty.  How is Baskerville relevant?”

Sherlock gave him a narrow look, but let that slide.  “The HOUND drug opened all the doors in my mind palace—just as I am about to do—and prevented me from closing them again.  Despite the advantage that knowing the situation gives me this time, I anticipate that releasing eight months of severe trauma into my consciousness at once will dwarf my fit of panic and the subsequent ill-considered behaviour at Baskerville.  Even in Moriarty’s prison, I left myself some ability to use my palace to filter my reactions, but I was… reduced.”

John tried not to react to the understatement.  Clearly, this was going to be hell.

“I am not accustomed to dealing with emotions I choose not to allow, but I will not simply be able to lock them down or even filter them _at all_ until I have sifted them through for information, because it is the emotions that are the trouble.  Being unable to separate them at the time, they’ve rooted themselves deeply into each memory.  I will be confused, disoriented, my perceptions of you and the environment potentially twisted, and at their mercy.

“Given the associations I have built between you and Moriarty, I may become submissive or afraid of you, sexually proceptive, or I may become antagonistic or aggressive in a way I was never allowed to express to his face.  Possibly at the same time, depending on my level of control or focus.  It would be challenging enough to operate normally through all of this, but I will need to devote my energy towards sifting through painful memories, not towards being _nice_.  This will, I suspect, be difficult for both of us, but unlike the experiment in Baskerville, for which you do indeed have my deepest and most unreserved apology, it is necessary, and will proceed with much greater ease and accuracy with your assistance, John.”

“So to sum up,” said John, “you’re going to be an even bigger prat than usual to me, and I need to put up with it or Moriarty’s going to blow up the planet.”

“And I am sorry.”

“Thank you,” said John shortly.  “Only one question, Sherlock,” he said.  “What if it doesn’t work? What if you can’t fix it?  Or what if you’re not better after you do?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, John,” said Sherlock.  “It’s hardly the first time I’ve stripped and rebuilt my mind palace.  How do you think I broke my cocaine addiction?  I even did a basic version of the process once inside Moriarty’s prison, when he made the mistake of leaving me alone for a few days.”

John stifled his response to the idea that breaking Sherlock’s addiction had been that simple.  “So why the melodrama then?  Why haven’t you just done that already?”

Sherlock sighed.  “Because _usually_ , I find a time when I can stay calm and focussed without difficulty.  I spend a couple of days in deep meditation, resettle my memories, and it’s done.  But usually I’m not dealing with this volume of traumatic memories, which are likely to completely overwhelm me.  Usually I’m still fundamentally myself while I complete the process—but without my mind palace, I am _broken_ , John.  There is no doubt.”

“You’re not broken, Sherlock,” said John, unable to help himself from reaching for and receiving Sherlock’s hand, squeezing it firmly.  “You broke _free_.  You fooled him, and you beat him. He didn’t predict that.  He had no idea how strong you are.”

“I will be,” said Sherlock.  “Once this is done.”

“Okay,” said John.  “What do you need?”

“It is, perhaps, poetic justice that our roles at Baskerville are about to be reversed,” said Sherlock.  “You will be the only one here with higher reasoning functions; you will need to keep me in line, and keep reminding me of my task.  Moriarty had a simple system to check my behaviour.  Watch closely.”  

He stroked his own cheek softly with his knuckles.  “This means ‘good boy.’”  He set his teeth, then slapped his hand onto his cheek.  “‘Bad boy,’” he said flatly.  “As we have recently become aware, drawing back your hand as a threat may be enough—but don’t hold back if you need to.  Moriarty was rarely gentle with misbehaviour or lack of focus, and if I become severely confused, I could be a danger to you.”

“Sherlock!”  John was on his feet before he realised it, although after a moment he managed to lock his hands together behind his back.  “I’m not going to hit you!  Are you _seriously_ suggesting that that I should deliberately give you the cues that Moriarty used to control you?   _Hurt_ you, like he did?  I am _not_ Moriarty, Sherlock!  I _will never_ do that!”

This was it, then; this was the moment John had been waiting for since Sherlock had first mentioned that he was having trouble separating from Moriarty—and having trouble separating John from him.  He had been looking forward to it, because it would mean that Sherlock’s healing could move forward out of this holding pattern; but he'd also been dreading it, because it would be the end of them both.  

Sherlock wanted John to be Moriarty for him; well, John was happy to provide comfort and companionship, but that was precisely as far down that path as John was prepared to go.  Moriarty was dead, and no matter what Sherlock thought, the cycle stopped here.  If Sherlock could realise that, then it would be worth it, even if it marked the arrival of the terrible moment when John would be forced to walk away forever.

“It’s fine,” said Sherlock dismissively.

“No, Sherlock.  It’s not.  Just… no.  I utterly refuse.  I hate it that you see him when you look at me, but I live with it.  I won’t _become_ him just because he’s made you think you miss him.”

“Miss _him?_ ”  Sherlock looked confused.  “He was a remorseless sadist with absolutely nothing to recommend him as a potential partner, let alone captor.  I don’t _miss him_.  And why would I see Moriarty in _you_?  It was the other way around.”

John made himself sit down before he could accidentally scare Sherlock again.  “It’s the same thing,” he said.  “You thought that I was going to hit you when I got upset.”

The hurt of that still churned in his chest.  Watching Sherlock—Sherlock!—flinch like that, not just expecting a blow from John but prepared to accept it as though if he didn’t, the consequences would be unthinkable.  And John had imagined, over the past month whenever he’d caught Sherlock watching him with that creepy look of adoration and relief, that _that_ had been the worst thing he could possibly see on Sherlock’s face.

“No,” said Sherlock, “I thought you were warning me that _he_ was about to.”

“Moriarty is dead,” said John flatly.  “I’m the only one here.”

“Obviously.”  Sherlock still seemed confused at John’s reaction.  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  But if you say ‘Vatican cameos’, I’ll duck, whether or not I’ve noticed the threat.”

“Sherlock, this isn’t about code words we’ve agreed to.  You’re ‘clinging’ to me because you’ve somehow convinced yourself I’m him, and that’s what longterm abuse survivors _do_.  They go back to their abusers, they keep going back, and they do everything they can to keep them from losing their temper again.  It’s a psychological defence mechanism to put off getting hurt again.  You don’t need to let me hit you to keep me happy, Sherlock.  I’m _not him_.”

“You’ve got it all backwards,” said Sherlock, clearly appalled.  “I’m not your mother, John—and you are by no means your father.”  

Well.  John guessed that answered the question of whether or not Sherlock had known about _that_.  

“I did what I did to ensure that _wouldn’t_ happen," Sherlock tried to explain.  "Moriarty was the abuser—but I had you as my protector.  It was vitally important that whatever happened I mustn’t forget he was the enemy, no matter how he tried to blur the line.  I needed to find it incomprehensible that he could have any redeeming qualities, but I still needed somewhere to store whatever he tried to convince me was there.  Moriarty called you my heart; I made you his.  That way I couldn’t forget that without you there, he would have been emotionally hollow.”

John pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Sherlock, please.  Small words.”

“Clearly there _are_ no words small enough to explain this concept to you.”  Sherlock pulled at a fistful of his hair in frustration, as though wishing that somehow he could simply draw the explanation out that way and transfer it physically.  “Think of it as multiple personalities.  He hurt me.  But when he was merciful enough to hurt me _less_ , I directed my unavoidable gratitude towards the part of him I thought was you.  He starved me.  But when he allowed me food, I believed that was you.  He controlled my actions with threats and violence.  But when I began to respond on my own, I believed I was freely agreeing to your request.  Demon and angel, you see?  He was both those at once—or at least he tried—but he wasn’t both things to _me_ , because whatever part of him I perceived as good, however meagre, however pathetic in what it granted me, I perceived as you.  The bad things, he kept—because how could it make sense for you to do those things?  At a subconscious level, it all worked.  I’m not 'clinging' because I think you're _him_.  In my mind, I’ve been clinging to you the whole time.”

John stared at him.  It sounded more like a rationalisation of a psychotic break than a valid intellectual defence to him, but… somewhere in there, he could almost grasp the reasoning.

“Only you, Sherlock,” he said, “could convince yourself that something like that makes sense—and then actually _redesign your own brain_ so that apparently it does.  Look, I can see it’s more complicated than I’d thought, but I still don’t think that it could possibly be a good idea for me to use his behaviour control system.  That’s seriously _not good_ , Sherlock, and I can’t imagine even the kind of angel that would live on Moriarty’s shoulder doing it.”

“There’s a difference here, in that I am _asking you to help me_.  Freely agreeing to your requests, remember?  It falls into the ‘John’ bucket, not the ‘Moriarty’ one.  I _trust_ you.”

“And now you want that to change?”

Sherlock gave him a long, level look.  “I would never, even if he had held me for my entire life, have deliberately placed my mind so wholly in his hands, or anyone else’s, as I am about to do in yours.  Mycroft could certainly do this for me—I could use the same trick I used for Moriarty to allow him access—but I do not trust him not to meddle with what he finds.  I am about to open all the doors, John.  I will not be able to retreat or repress.  I will be _me_ , truly all of _me_ for the first time since I was six years old.  You’ve been worried I haven’t been expressing enough trauma?  Believe me, John, you are about to get your wish.  If I don’t become hysterical, distracted or aggressive, it will be a miracle—and unless you want to end up having me sectioned, I’ll need to be able to reach through that chaos to work on fixing my palace.  We don’t have time to waste on refusing to utilise the best possible means to keep me focussed.  You trusted me in Baskerville, and I took advantage of that trust.  I trusted _you_ to protect me in Moriarty’s den, and now we can _both_ take advantage of that trust to bring his plan to a halt.  I cannot do this without you.”

“You do understand that, in general, the point of trust is in the _not_ taking advantage of it?” grumbled John.  

Sherlock looked more frustrated than ever.  “It’s not _enough_ anymore to tiptoe around you, hoping I don’t offend your heterosexual sensibilities, trying not to impinge too far into your personal space.  I need to fix myself _now_.”

“Sherlock, no!” said John, horrified.  Is that what Sherlock thought he’d been doing?  Trying to hide his nightmares, his panic attacks, his nervous tics because he was trying to protect John’s _feelings_?  “It doesn’t matter about me, I’d do _anything_ to help you come to terms with what he did to you, and I would never think less of you for however you react to it—just as long as it’s something that _actually helps_.”

“Then do this for me.  Please.”

John stared at him for a long moment.  

No psychiatrist in the world would have agreed to such a course of action.  John should be struck off the medical register for letting Sherlock self-diagnose and treat for so long already.  He should be disbarred as a friend for even considering taking it further.  He was completely unacceptable as a potential lover if he could actively reinforce the system that already circumvented Sherlock's capacity for consent.  

Surely it could only end badly, but… Sherlock was so certain that this was the right course of action.  What would Sherlock do if he said no?  Would he ask Mycroft to help him?  Would he attempt it on his own, when he was already certain that would be a disaster?  Were there really any other options?  What would any mental health professional used to dealing with garden variety minds make of Sherlock, when he’d been making a game out of deceiving psychiatrists since he was a child?  Would they have any chance at all of helping him, with his self-induced psychosis and his deliberately repressed memories, when he believed there was a better way?  John tried not to listen to the tiny voice inside that wondered if it even _had_ been deliberate, if Sherlock was merely rationalising the situation and his own mental breakdown.  Could _anyone_ actually do what Sherlock claimed to have done?

 _No one could be that clever_ , he remembered Sherlock saying.

 _You could_ , John had told him.

He bowed his head in agreement.  Sherlock had asked.  And when Sherlock Holmes called, John Watson came running.

“‘Good boy.’  ‘Bad boy,’” repeated Sherlock, making the motions again.  “ _Don’t hold back_ ,” he said again sternly.  “It’s _fine_ , what I need is not your sympathy, but your help to focus.  My face into your chest,” he gestured as though cradling someone’s head against his heart, “is ‘It’s over now,’ but you use that one instinctively.”  He pushed back his sleeves.  “Warning.”

Then he positioned a hand in a semicircle at his throat, but didn’t let it touch the skin.  “This one is hard to translate, but it essentially means: ‘You can’t live without me.’  I imagine it might be useful in the unlikely event that I become unmanageably violent as—unless it’s accompanied by a kiss—even the lightest touch will cause me to immediately suffer a panic attack and lose consciousness.”

John instantly resolved to never—no matter how Sherlock behaved while he was rebuilding, or how things did or did not change between them once he was healed— _never_ touch the other man's neck.

“Have you got them all?” asked Sherlock.

The cues were burned in his brain, nightmare images of how Moriarty might have used them parading behind his eyes.  There was no chance that John would forget them, no matter how much he wanted to.  

John repeated the motions on his own body, as Sherlock had done, in confirmation.  “Good,” he said, shying away from Sherlock’s insulting wording, “Not good, It’s over, Warning, Good night.  I’ve got them.”  

“Then I shall begin,” said Sherlock, and settled onto his back on the couch.

“Not before some food you won’t,” said John.  “There’s some leftovers from Mrs. Hudson in the fridge.  And a couple of big glasses of water.  It will only take a few minutes to get it into you first, and I’m sure it’ll be more disruptive if I have to try to get you to eat and drink later.”

Sherlock followed him tolerantly into the kitchen, settling at the table and drinking the glass of water that appeared in front of him without complaint, while John bustled around the kitchen, getting plates and opening and closing doors.

“Sherlock…” he said, once the lasagne was heating in the microwave.  He wondered if Sherlock truly understood how abhorrent John found the whole concept of directly operating a hardwired switch in someone else's brain.  “You know you don’t ever have to worry that I’ll use those cues on you deliberately, not once we’re through this.”

Sherlock frowned at him, clearly bemused at the clarification.  “Obviously.  Hopefully once I’ve cleaned up, I’ll be able to disable them.  But I don’t mind if you use them still.  Vatican cameos, remember?  Could be useful.”

No, Sherlock just didn’t get it.  John shook his head.


	7. Aquaphobia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty is a knight in slightly tarnished Westwood, Sherlock resolves a state of some confusion, and John is a very good doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to the betaing of Megabat, who was very patient indeed with the way this chapter seemed to grow every time I looked at it, to the extent that it eventually had to be split into two and _still_ ended up long. Enjoy. :)

_Water poured out of everywhere now, constant, unstoppable, no way to hold it back, sweeping through the palace in torrents that levelled the furniture, sending it spinning away in eddies that dragged and ducked and dived in the cataclysm._

_The raging tsunami of gushing, crushing misery smashed staircases and splintered doors, leaving them shattered, hinges hanging, broken in pieces.  It flooded the hall, terror filling every crack and corner, finding its way into all the hiding places, nothing left, bolt holes overflowing, secrets floating out of his grasp, drifting away from his fingertips, rippling hopeless waves spreading in perfect circles, propagating from the centre, not dying away but getting stronger, interfering, reinforcing, rolling, crashing, battering, breaking, overwhelming._

_—it off, he’s—can’t be, his eyes are—something’s not—should call him—a trick, look at—said something like this might—our pay grade, we’ve got to—you want to_ die _?—be the one who_ didn’t _call him?—you do it, if you're so—_

_Alone in the dark, deep, dripping, draining, sucking despair seeping into his skin until it wrinkled and peeled, scraped away, fingers tapping, sliding, pushing, holding, gripping pulling hurting, nowhere safe, never get out._

_—seemed fine when we cuffed—jets alternating temperature—just snapped, started screaming at—if we get near enough to—unless we use the tranq gun, which—doesn't seem to understand instructions, or threats—wasn’t sure—didn't even seem to notice when we—usually cooperative enough to—_

_“Is he faking?”  One real voice cut through the confusion._

_Rattling hands over his ears, hurting, pressing, blocking, squeezing, row row row your boat, pain irrelevant, block out the water, gently down the stream, don't let it in, nothing works, merrily merrily merrily merrily, seeping through the cracks, slipping through his fingers and inside, making its home_ there _._

 _—thinks he is, but I wasn’t so—look at his_ wrists _—couldn’t be certain, so—call to check what—_

_“Right answer.  Leave.”  Footsteps shifted.  “Now, Sherly, what do we have here?”_

_Never get away from the fingers on the walls, tap-tap-tapping, splashing, searching, pressing, pulling, inside his mind, seeking entrance, water getting in, hands on him, moist fingers, inside him even when there’s no one there, never stopping, in his brain, please no, doesn’t help, makes it worse, make it stop, stop its heart, reach inside, peel him open, let it in, shouldn't have let it in, dirty water, why can't he stop it, slicing through, drill a hole in his skull so_ he _can_ really _—footsteps closer—water rising mounting climbing lashing surging screaming—_

 _“Don’t you_ dare _strike at me.”  The mild outrage penetrated the haze, carried on a familiar voice, along with the sound of cloth sliding on bare arms._

_—sleeves, pushed back sleeves, bare arms no sleeves—_

_STOP!  Suspended, petrified, mummified, motionless as the unstoppable wave crests, mustn’t swim, mustn’t drown, mustn’t move, might be wrong, sinking all the while, filling nose and mouth, no more air, only water, only water ever again._

_“Now_ come back _.  You don’t get to hide away in there.”_

 _The words came along with a glancing slap across his bowed face, dashing him against the icy walls of the mind palace, shards of black sharp cruel crystal rock, dripping, bad boy,_ bad boy _.  Then he was falling again and the despair welled anew, closing over his face, filling his lungs and he let himself sink, bad boy, falling falling, down into the deep dark._

_A hand grasped his chin, pulling his face up from his chest._

_“I said come_ back _.”_

_The second slap landed solidly, a thunderclap in an empty room, resonating through the palace, knocking mirrored ice crystal shards off the wall in freezing showers, shattering and skittering away, a thousand reflections of bad luck, invisible and sharp and treacherously slippery—but the flowing water stopped._

_The hall was suddenly empty, water gone but where was he?  Gone with the water, unable to see, unable to find, searching for what?  He wanted to be good.  It was_ imperative _he be good.  Good meant warm, food, contact, safe, but never dry.  Come back, come back where?_

_There was a face, a face that meant something.  Be good, bad boy, come back, don't hide, no more drowning, ice is water, snow is ice, find the land, come back._

_“There you are, sweetness, I see you.  I see you trying.  Eyes fixed on me, that helps, doesn’t it?”_

_There was a voice with the face, soothing now, help me, please help, trust you, find you, find a way._

_“Don’t worry, Daddy’s not disappointed in you, well maybe a bit, but I can't help wanting more, can I?  Good boy, you’ve got it now.  Here you go, I’m just undoing your cuffs.  There’s one—ooh, nasty, you’re going to smear that on me, aren’t you?”_

_Don't go, please no, pain pain, don't leave, wet floor, water coming, come back—_

_“Settle down, I’m not going anywhere, just taking off my jacket.  All right, Daddy's back, here you are.  There’s the other hand; now you’re out.  Come on, over here where it’s dry.  Down we go, that’s it.  Daddy’s got you.  Daddy’s got you.”_

_Then the fingers were stroking his cheek, caressing, cradling, and he melted against the heartbeat that tickled his ear: faint, constant, rhythmic, warm, safe.  Safe._

_Somewhere in the damp, flood-damaged recesses of his mind palace, it echoed._

_"What happened?” he whispered into the buttons beneath his lips, or tried to, but the words didn't come out right, just unintelligible sounds._

_His brain wouldn’t work; it wouldn’t even start.  The sense of being a person with a solid boundary of skin was inexplicably missing, the memories an incomprehensible jumble._

_He was shaking, shaking all over as adrenaline withdrew, leaving him empty, scoured inside of everything.  Not so much numb, as blank.  No thoughts.  No connections.  No Sherlock._

_“You had a psychotic episode,” explained Moriarty, obviously deciphering his question.  He sounded sympathetic.  “Side effect of the environment, I’m afraid.  The mind tries to protect itself.  Doesn’t work, of course, not with the triggers I’ve implanted to pull you out again.  It’s a good sign, really; means I’m getting all the way through.  Accelerates the process.”_

_Sherlock expected it would._

_This was nothing like the transcendent loss of self that came from intellectual abstraction, with electricity coruscating through deductive chains at blistering speed, carrying him high above the mundane physical needs of his transport._

_Not like that.  This was the opposite._

_He felt dull, crippled.  Each thought was insulated and isolated, alone and unconnected.  Constrained to a single, obvious path.  Entirely without consequence or insight._

_Ordinary._

_He had wondered how quiet it might be, in their tiny little minds.  How slow.  He hadn’t wanted to live there._

_He gave a dry sob and buried his face deeper into Moriarty’s chest, inhaling the scent of his cologne and his body, seeking… something.  Some point of contact to anchor him, to make him feel less insubstantial.  He felt as though the slightest wrong move might cause the last remnant of his very self to dissipate unnoticed._

_“No sulking, now,” chided Moriarty, but he covered one of Sherlock’s nerveless hands with his and pressed it to his chest, lacing their fingers together to hold them steady.  “Your brain’s a beautiful thing, darling, but surely you realised that it wasn’t going to cope much longer.  You’ve been putting it under too much strain.  Confusing yourself.  Preventing yourself from facing facts.  If you will use it to be boring, you can’t blame it for becoming oooor-din-aaary!  I’ve warned you not to think yourself away, but have you listened to Daddy?”_

_His thoughts existed in a vacuum, emanating invisibly from a bodiless nothing in the empty, all but destroyed atrium of his mind palace, vanishing into nothingness without meeting or affecting anything.  Occasionally they glanced upon a recognisable piece of rubbish amid the debris: grey-brown tiles from the mosaic floor shredded and scattered in drifts, smashed plates, lifted wall panels, torn off doors, and shattered sections of filigree screen, but it didn't mean anything.  Couldn't cohere._

_After the sensory deprivation, his brain had felt like a wrung-out sponge, greedily sucking in every disconnected piece of sensory input as though it were a crime scene where_ everything mattered _, multiplying and intensifying to maximise observations without filtering for relevance.  His mind had been overwhelmed by the influx of discomforting sensations—stripped bare, raw and defenseless—but still recognisably his mind._

_Now, there was nothing.  He was in a room.  It had walls, presumably, and a door.  Moriarty was wearing a shirt.  They were sitting on the floor.  Were there details?  Did they matter?_

_Surely even an ordinary mind couldn’t be so dull, so completely lacking in colour.  Lead sinking through black treacle.  Perhaps this was how Anderson felt, all the time.  Perhaps Sherlock was even further out the other side.  Vacant windows in an empty house._

_“It’ll come back,” Moriarty soothed, his expression of amusement at odds with the reassuring tone.  “Probably.  It’s mostly just the sleep deprivation.  Well, and the stress, but you’re doing_ that _to yourself.  The human body isn’t really designed for either, long term.  I am glad I managed to get it right, though.  I wasn’t entirely sure I could manage it without drugs, but you’re the one who thought that wouldn’t be playing fair.  It would have been a shame to skip this part of the process with_ you _.  It's more fun breaking special things.  But I don’t expect there’s any permanent damage.  This time.”  There was a pause.  “Can you speak?”_

_“I hate you,” managed Sherlock blankly._

_His fingers tightened through Moriarty’s in counterpoint to the declaration.  The plaster bust of the other man in his mind palace was undamaged.  It stood, unassuming, in its customary place atop its plinth on the stairway amid the flood-damaged devastation, as though it had been anchored solidly into the bedrock beneath._

_“No, you don’t,” laughed Moriarty affectionately.  He brushed the fingers of his free hand from Sherlock’s cheek, down the side of his throat to rest on his collarbone, and dropped a kiss on Sherlock’s forehead before the response could trigger.  “You know the subconscious doesn't work that way. I’m the one who brought you out of it.  Now…”_

_He gave Sherlock a quick squeeze before pushing him off and standing, apparently oblivious to the way hands fisted convulsively at his shirt, trying and failing to hold onto him._

_“I’m afraid I actually do need to get back to what I was doing,” he said, brushing down his suit trousers.  “Criminal empires don’t run themselves, you know.  Busy, busy, busy.  And now I’m going to have to kill another dry-cleaner.”  He wasn’t looking at the dark pink chrysanthemum on his chest where Sherlock's lacerated wrists had rested—the shirt was clearly a dead loss—but inspecting an imperceptible spot on the trousers that apparently wouldn’t shift.  “I can tell; I can’t stand a mismatched set, but I know bloodstains.  I don't get my hands dirty, as such, but sometimes people do splash.”_

_Sherlock hung his head, the emptiness clawing at his lungs as the other man walked away, still grumbling._

_The only battle was how to speak through the tightness in his throat._

_It wasn't panic.  It wasn’t even fear._

_It wasn’t anything._

_“Please,” Sherlock managed.  What it lacked in volume and eloquence, it made up in hopeless resignation.  "Daddy,_ please _."_

_Moriarty turned in the doorway, enjoying it for a moment before he conceded.  “Oh, all right,” he said.  “Come on, then, you’ll be fine as long as you’re with Daddy.  I’ll fix up your wrists, and then—if you want to double-check whether that brain of yours still functions—you can help me with my work.”_

_Dark, powdery swathes of mould blossomed through the damp, sodden walls of his mind palace and up over the surface of the weathered and battle-scarred oak door that locked off the rest of his mind._

_The only emotion Sherlock could feel was gratitude._

***

Sherlock’s mind palace was fixed.  Once he had blasted open the doors and stripped it back to a bare room, stopped trying to patch the old imagery and scrapped it entirely, it was surprisingly easy to rebuild.  It took only four days to reconstruct the whole palace and realign the connections in sensible order, and he was _back_.

Oh, Sherlock had no doubt that some disturbing memories still might pop up occasionally without being called—it was a palace, not a fortress, after all—but any remaining emotional instability could be dealt with on a case by case basis, now that he had regained the ability to barricade the unhelpful feelings.  When he had some spare time he would spend a few days deleting at least some of the overwhelming drudgery from the tedious tasks that Moriarty had apparently gained pleasure from having Sherlock repeat.  For the moment, though, until he was more certain of the direction of Moriarty’s plans, it was safer to leave everything unedited.  He needed to make sure he retained even the most trivial pieces of information until after Moriarty’s threat had permanently passed, to ensure nothing could be overlooked.  

Sherlock had decided that it was easiest to build an underground swimming pool complex in the sub-level of his mind palace to store the collection of still surprisingly traumatic emotions that Moriarty had nurtured.  The echoing pool chamber rather naturally swallowed up all the disorderly feelings, sanitised and organised within square corners and filtration systems and lane markings, slotting them each into position, filling the room with the smell of chlorine and the fractured glitter of light on the rippling surface of emotions.  

Once the distracting portion of each memory was set aside, they were easy enough to neatly sort into their correct places, appropriately interlaced with logical connections rather than ricocheting wildly on irrelevant emotional detours.   

He carefully teased his mental image of John out from Moriarty’s centre, completely and finally separating them again.  He found that his plan had been… mostly successful in subverting Moriarty’s ultimate goal.

Temporarily granting Moriarty the impression of John's essential goodness, his stolid loyalty, and his comfortable permission to touch Sherlock's body had worked exactly as Sherlock had hoped.  It had been a necessary step to provide balance and verisimilitude to the working persona trapped in the entrance hall of his palace, what would otherwise have been a broken shadow of himself.  Surrender had been inevitable in the end, but with John as a mental shield, Sherlock could shamelessly draw on the offered comfort to shore up his fundamentally weak surface persona, believing himself able to see behind the mask of sadism.  Safe to let himself care for and be cared for by the man he imagined he could see beneath.  

Despite the absence of any physical desire for the body in front of him, despite being constantly battered by Moriarty's playful cruelty, despite his continued skittish sexual reluctance, despite his stubborn pledge to deny and resist as long as he could, his surface persona had found it surprisingly painless to give in.  

And how could Moriarty _create_ an attachment if one was already there?  How could he force Sherlock to love him, when Sherlock had already yielded his deepest regard and affection to that part of Moriarty he’d convinced himself lay beneath the smoke and mirrors?  How could any small dignity or grudging allowance Moriarty granted add to Sherlock’s regard for him, when he had John at his core as that best and brightest part, a part of him that could outshine any insignificant act of mercy like a supernova swallowing up the sparks of a campfire?

Sherlock _had_ protected his heart.  He’d instinctively kept the distinction clear (if subliminal) in his mind palace between the acts of malice by the pitiless spider who rejoiced in his distress and discomfort, who invaded and insightfully humiliated him, who terrified and systematically reduced him—and the acts of grace by the humble doctor-soldier who would kill but only ever to protect, who might hurt but only to heal, who could make him feel exposed but never violated.  He had _never_ forgotten at his core what Moriarty truly was, no matter how the man had tried.

It was draining work, methodically extracting and locking away the more obviously unavoidable emotional reactions that he’d experienced in response to Moriarty’s unveiled manipulation and abuse.  By comparison, detaching the false sense of _John_ —and with it the fallacious and inappropriate chemical responses associated with softer emotions—had been easy.  The two idealisations that had shared Moriarty's body were incompatible.  They split down the middle, efficiently stripping the memories of all but the facts.  

Only not entirely.  A residual disquiet remained in Sherlock’s mind as he worked his way through the games Moriarty had played with him, searching for useful data and examining habits and sly remarks for clues.  The impression of dissatisfaction suffused him, and he was unable to pinpoint any rational basis.  The tightness in his throat only worsened when he reminded himself that the man was finally dead, that he’d killed him himself.  He’d made _certain_.  

It had seemed obvious at the outset that any attachment Moriarty expected to manufacture would be an indivisible thing, built on the comfort and relief at the cessation of violence, and easily enough displaced.  

It hadn’t occurred to Sherlock that one might... become accustomed, even to the less benign aspects of a companion.  

It sufficed, for now, to lock the lingering feeling of loss away in the underground swimming pool with the other unpleasant emotions from his time with Moriarty.  He looked forward to a time when the spectre of Moriarty’s legacy was fully gone, and he could finish deleting the last of those memories.  

He would give the unwelcome sentiment no more quarter than the man.

When Sherlock was finally finished the process, separating and interring the last few memories, he closed the door on the pool with some relief and a satisfying sense of finality.  John would almost certainly consider this an inadequate solution, but Sherlock could see no point to wallowing there, now that he could finally completely put it aside.  It had been unexpectedly distracting, and any information Moriarty had given him pertinent to solving his last puzzle could hardly be found _there_.

There were some residual tics even with his palace rebuilt; Sherlock tested that straight away despite the urgency of the work on the Moriarty case.  It was only to be expected, but he could deal with them without any imposition on his rationality.

He made tea, in the teapot, poured it himself, and drank a whole cup in celebration.  He still didn’t enjoy the ghastly taste, but that was an acceptable loss.  

He became mildly unsettled when John walked out of the flat, on a mission to retrieve some death certificates from the morgue at Sherlock’s request, but easily shook it off and involved himself in another pursuit until he returned.

He refused a plate of food that John pushed at him, despite the uneasy feeling and mild nausea that ignoring his insistence gave him.

He took a leisurely shower without more than a perfunctory thought of John’s absence, and even washed his hair without finding himself humming along to the memory of Moriarty’s musical tenor even once.  Well, maybe once, but definitely no more than that.

He’d even slept alone.  He’d sent John up to his own room to catch up on proper sleep after the exhausting four days he’d spent shepherding Sherlock’s irrational reactions.  The man was worn out enough that he hadn’t sent Sherlock more than a cursory glance of mixed relief and concern before disappearing up the stairs.  Admittedly tired himself, Sherlock had eventually fallen asleep on the couch—only for a few hours—but that was hardly abnormal.  

All in all, Sherlock was quite pleased with the objective measures of his mental state.  His initial assessment gave it perhaps eight-and-a-half to nine out of ten.  Any remaining shadow of the conditioned responses should be easy enough to ignore, gradually overwriting the neural pathways until they dissipated with time.

As for John… Sherlock suspected that unless he wished to delete John entirely—obviously out of the question—the man would always be able to induce an instant chemical response in his brain by giving one of Moriarty’s cues.  No longer, however, did those cues control him.

He’d proved that as best he could; at this point it was John’s move.

For now, Sherlock’s full focus was on identifying and dismantling Moriarty’s plan for initiating the apocalypse.  Or whatever it was that he had planned.

Unfortunately, yet again, it wasn’t that simple.

Of course Moriarty hadn’t simply told Sherlock his plans.

He’d told Sherlock lots of things, mostly about the domestic crimes that had always been Sherlock’s favourite.  Once Sherlock had dug it all out of his memories and set it straight, it had solved three homicides (two of which had been thought solved with an innocent behind bars—one of _those_ sent there by Mycroft, to Sherlock's smug satisfaction), five disappearances (one a homicide, one a forced suicide, one mistaken identity and two relocations), four robberies (two insurance frauds, one revenge, and one a cover for the theft of an illegal item that the owner couldn’t report as stolen), and two forgeries (one art, one currency).  The unsolved crime wave hadn’t been nearly as bad as Sherlock had feared; John had told Sherlock about Mycroft’s vow to keep his work alive until Moriarty was dead, but he hadn’t realised that Mycroft had taken it quite so seriously.

It was strangely depressing—not so much to find that the police force had functioned mostly without him for eight months, because Sherlock could see the shadow of Mycroft’s hand pointing them in the right direction from behind the scenes—but that Moriarty had never let on that he was engaged in an epic battle that surely provided every bit as much entertainment for him as his pointless games with Sherlock.  That at least half of the crimes Sherlock had theoretically solved, improved, or even created from scratch under Moriarty’s supervision, had in fact turned out to be an abject failure.  Moriarty had continued to behave, throughout the course of Sherlock’s imprisonment, as though Mycroft had been a trivial annoyance.

Of course, Moriarty had seldom cared about the success or failure of his clients’ plans.  It was certain that, once he was paid, it mattered very little to him whether they thrived or even survived.  In fact, part of the signature he had encouraged Sherlock to imitate had been to embed a hook in every fix, some small unnoticed detail which would make even the complete literal fulfilment of their wish turn to ashes in the client’s mouth.

Moriarty had probably considered Mycroft’s efforts amusing, like a tiny dog yapping at passing traffic from behind the fence, without any conception of what would happen to it if it actually got in the way of a lorry.

Still, it was vaguely disquieting that Moriarty had managed to keep something so fundamental from Sherlock so completely—because he also seemed to have done the same with any information even remotely related to whatever he’d set up as his dead man’s switch.

Sherlock had actually been able to use that negative image as a guide, to some extent.  He was painfully familiar with Moriarty’s style, now, and he’d easily pinpointed some obvious gaps in their knowledge of the man’s movements from the files Mycroft had passed on—including chatter that had fired up the day before his death and then been clearly quashed by Moriarty himself in the intervening twenty-four hours.

The leaders of several terrorist cells that Sherlock had never heard of, but Mycroft had been keeping a wary eye on, were assassinated by sniper fire despite being in what most people would consider to be a safe bunker.  There’d been some minor scuffles between separatist groups in Afghanistan, all of them clearly under Moriarty’s wing despite Sherlock’s ignorance of them, which had ended in a messy series of betrayals that had wiped them all out almost to a man.  Three crime syndicates worldwide had undergone varyingly bloody leadership coups—another five had lost an important senior member, none of which Sherlock had specifically known were Moriarty’s contacts.  A dictator in central Africa whose association was obvious, once Sherlock looked, had been lynched outside his own palatial residence.  And two major corporations he could see had been taking advice on unscrupulous tactics had folded—one being investigated for fraud, and the other suddenly finding the prices of its major product line unexpectedly undercut by a well-marketed mass-produced imitation.

It all had the feel of Moriarty to it, but Sherlock couldn’t see what purpose the whole thing could serve apart from housekeeping and satisfying Moriarty’s general inclination for mischief.  The people involved had been garden variety criminals and fanatics—uninspired, unreliable and universally loathed—nobody missed them or would be looking to avenge their deaths.  Useful pawns, perhaps, but Sherlock couldn’t see how any of them were any kind of linchpin that could create chaos merely by their absence.

He couldn’t shake the impression that they were all false data points, obscuring the key at the heart of it all—a key that was most likely too subtle to be found in anyone’s files.

But there had to be a pattern; Sherlock simply couldn’t make any sense of it.

 _You love my games because you know that I will_ always _beat you,_ the memory arose without bidding.   _You want someone who can prove they’re_ better _than—_

No, that wasn’t true.  Sherlock had _beaten_ Moriarty.  He had seen that mixture of pleasure and surprise in his eyes, that fractional moment of not-bored-anymore frozen permanently onto the remnants of his face.  Moriarty had underestimated Sherlock: underestimated the depth of his intellect, underestimated how much of his dignity and his identity he would be prepared to lose to appear convincingly broken, underestimated how completely he could allow a character with all its debilitating weaknesses to take him over, underestimated the complexity of the layers of subterfuge he would have to peel back to reach Sherlock himself at the bottom of his own mind.

At the end, he had thought Sherlock was boring, boring enough to kill himself rather than risk losing Moriarty and the bond he'd forced on Sherlock, and it had been his downfall.

Sherlock would beat him in this, too.

The day before his death, Moriarty had been ecstatic to announce to Sherlock that he had a new project in the works—something he’d hoped would be more interesting eventually than Sherlock.  He hadn’t given any details.  What he _had_ said had been cryptic and had meandered erratically, although that was hardly unusual.  Much of the extraneous activity in his network seemed to date from the beginning of _that_ project, rather than being triggered by his death, but Sherlock couldn’t separate which incidents were associated with which event.

The criminals of the world had subsided into a kind of stunned silence in the aftermath of the abrupt upheaval, and in the absence of their undisputed ruler.  Everything seemed quiet… but Sherlock knew better.  This was the calm before the storm; if he couldn’t put the picture together now, by the time it became clear, it would be too late.

Moriarty _could_ have lied about having left a dead man’s switch—but why would he?  As soon as the memory had resurfaced in Sherlock’s mind, it had rung true.  Of _course_ Moriarty would have plans to destroy the whole of humankind after he was gone.  It was precisely the kind of thing that appealed to him.  Overdramatic, egocentric, and devastating—something only a psychopathic madman would consider. And he was quite right that there was no one alive he cared about.

The only person Moriarty had ever been motivated to help were his paying clients and, even apart from the way he’d sneered at their pitiable ordinary concerns and destroyed their lives in small but keenly penetrating ways, he had regularly outright betrayed them as often as he had helped.  It was the boredom he was keeping at bay by working on the puzzles they brought him like offerings, not any kind of work ethic.

He was extraordinarily careless even with his own safety, trusting his life to the specific nature of Sherlock’s failing grip on sanity, laughing as he was dangled over the side of a building—and when John had held him in a headlock while wearing a vest of explosives and a constellation of laser dots.  He’d let himself be captured and worked over by Mycroft just to gain a few useless tidbits of information to further his obsession.

Sherlock was frankly only surprised that Moriarty had waited to set the switch in motion until after his death, when he wouldn’t be able to watch the fires and dance as the world burned around him.  Presumably he’d never been quite that bored, but it had only ever been a matter of time.

Records of recent activity exhausted, Sherlock was left with examining the files on the flurry of criminal enterprises directly after he’d been picked up by Moriarty’s men; perhaps Moriarty had waited until then to start setting up the switch to avoid any possibility that Sherlock could identify it and raise the alarm.

Of course, there had been a number of crimes covering up any remaining evidence of Moriarty’s reality and the façade of Richard Brook—several of them with connections far too obvious to have risked while Sherlock was still free to point out the logical inconsistencies—but all had been easily solved by Mycroft once he had set his mind to clearing Sherlock’s name.

Then there were the deaths of the people who’d helped Sherlock to fake his suicide; Moriarty had needed to silence those as soon as possible without arousing Mycroft’s suspicions, to allay the risk of anyone giving away the secret.

The homeless network had been easy enough.  He’d been right in his theory that a tainted drug batch had claimed the lives of eight addicts, a major dealer, and five homeless bums—two of whom had never used drugs in their lives, damn the stupid _blind_ police who’d conducted what they had laughably described as an ‘investigation’—but it was a dead end.  The dealer who’d lost his life had certainly been Moriarty’s contact handling the distribution.  With the bodies of the victims cremated for Pauper’s funerals and the crime scenes left open to the weather and the public for so long, any remaining evidence—not that there would have been any in the first place, not on a crime so easy to camouflage—was long gone.

The only thing left to investigate was the death of Molly Hooper.  

Now that Sherlock’s mind palace was fixed and he was more capable of retreating into a state of pure logic, he had to admit that he hadn’t only been leaving what was likely the least relevant information until last; he been avoiding it.

It was irrational to exhibit such obvious avoidance behaviour.  Caring wouldn’t help her now, any more than it had then when he’d first understood that her life was forfeit thanks to her role in Sherlock’s suicide.  It had been a bad move to involve her at all; Sherlock had been too caught up in his own cleverness to imagine that Moriarty might anticipate him, let alone have been manipulating him towards that course all along.  But in the midst of Moriarty’s plan, her unknowing sacrifice had saved Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, and John—or more realistically, had saved Sherlock—because Sherlock knew that he would still have jumped to save them even if it had truly meant his own death.  Granted, it hadn’t saved him from Moriarty, but… he _was_ still alive, thanks to her.

He’d had no fear that her death would have been in the police files he’d examined first, of course.  It would have been something that seemed entirely above board, something not even worthy of a coroner's inquest.  It would have had to pass muster with Mycroft as, even if no one else did, he would have found it suspicious that the pathologist who had certified Sherlock’s death and laid him out for identification had died before he got the chance to cross-examine her to determine her truthfulness.

Sherlock closed the insistent feelings back away into the basement pool where they belonged, and flipped through the files John had brought back from the morgue—all the deaths from the previous eleven months, beginning with his own—looking for the one he needed.

It wasn’t there.

Somehow, that was a disappointment after he had finally steeled himself to look.  Clearly, John had neglected to pick that one up; sentiment, presumably, assuming that a friend whose death he had thought was natural hadn’t been touched by Moriarty’s schemes.  Leaving it out to spare Sherlock's feelings, as though it would have made him feel better to lack information.

"You missed the report on Molly Hooper,” Sherlock told him.

There was no answer.

Sherlock looked around, surprised to find that John wasn’t in the room.  Well, the fact that he hadn’t noticed that was gratifying, at least.  He conducted a brief search of the flat, and found John in the kitchen, making tea.

“I need Molly Hooper,” he said, gesturing with the files.

“What do you need from her?”  John gave him a considering look over the kettle and then filled up his mug, keeping a wary eye on Sherlock as he did so.  “Want a cup?”

Sherlock shook his head, more to dismiss the distraction than to refuse the tea.  “I understand it’s unpleasant for you to imagine her death as anything other than an accident or natural causes, but she was murdered.  I need the details, and her death certificate isn’t here.”

“Jesus, she’s _dead_?  When did this happen?”  John put his mug back down to settle the sudden jostling of the hot liquid, looking pale and shocked.

“Not long after I disappeared,” said Sherlock shortly, ignoring the implied question of _why_.  A mirroring emotion seemed to have welled up out of the pool room at the sight of John’s upset.  Perhaps there was something wrong with the lock.

“What?” said John, obviously confused.  “I bumped into her in the morgue the other day—I mean—she wasn’t a corpse, she was the pathologist.  She was in a rush, didn’t have time to talk, but…  Molly’s not dead, Sherlock.”

“Of course she’s dead,” explained Sherlock.  “Moriarty couldn’t have risked leaving her alive.  It’s the only way he could have been sure that… she…”  

He trailed off, realising the futility of arguing logic in the face of evidence.  John was, while not a perfect witness, as Sherlock had personally demonstrated, at least a reliable one in many respects.

“You _saw_ her?”

John nodded.

“Alive?”

John nodded again.

“But _why_ …” said Sherlock, finding his mind unaccountably blank.  

He stuffed the emotion back into its room and locked it firmly.  

Observation: if Molly was alive, then this was in contravention of all logic.  Obvious conclusion: this could only be the linchpin.

He stared at the closed door to the swimming pool while connections and deductions raced past in front of his eyes.  He stared, and stared, until the deductions faded and the words slowed, and all that was left was the light dancing in rippling waves in the slit underneath the door, burning into the backs of his eyes.

Secondary conclusion: Sherlock had been wrong about where he would find the information he needed.

He opened the door again and looked at the pool consideringly.  Fractured fluorescents and red laser pinpoints played across the surface of the water, cold and deep and chemical-smelling.

Fact: Molly was the linchpin.  

Sherlock considered a moment longer.  Then he stepped over the threshold.

“John, get your coat,” he said, as the emotions rushed to meet him.  “We’re going out.  The game is on!”

***

Sherlock was back.

John could barely believe it, could never have imagined that even Sherlock could have managed such a thing.  That his mind—that brilliant, implausible, _preposterous_ mind—could be so powerful that it could intellectualise the process of dealing with pain, reason it to its knees and then dismiss it without a trace.

For four days, Sherlock had teetered on the brink.  One moment he would be curled up and sobbing as though his world had ended, the next he would be raging, the next clawing at his own skin, the next hyperventilating in panic, the next quiet, almost catatonic with resignation.  John had feared, faced with the abrupt reality of his friend’s complete and utter breakdown, that Sherlock’s prediction of needing to be sectioned might become reality.

He’d begun to think of the horror of that; to have rescued him from one prison—one hell—only to send him straight into what would be, for him, another.  Of Sherlock—bright and bold and untameable—trapped in rooms with plastic mirrors and slip on shoes; of trying to convince him to take prescribed medication instead of palming it, or to cooperate with boring psychiatrists rather than deducing them until they left him alone; of the heartbreaking certainty that even if he _did_ come through, he would likely never be quite the same.

Despite John’s reservations, the cues that Moriarty had instilled in Sherlock’s mind were a godsend, even if John found it impossible to imagine Moriarty in the role of God’s agent.  At first it felt invasive of Sherlock’s autonomy to use Moriarty’s cues, but as time went on it seemed less like a violation and more like the precisely judged and purposeful cut of a scalpel.  He tried not to interfere too much with the natural passage of Sherlock’s emotions—but clearly, Sherlock really did need help to manage them, and he showed no sign whatsoever of responding to—or even hearing—words alone, despite John’s litany of soothing chatter.

John didn’t mind at all using the positive reinforcement, gently touching Sherlock’s cheek, reiterating his support and faith and watching the way it gradually eased the shame and doubt from his posture and lit his eyes with the fire of determination.  

He certainly enjoyed, perhaps too much, the way Sherlock would calm, pulled instantly out of whatever dark place he’d gone when John pulled his head against his shoulder and reminded him that however much the scars still pained him, it was all over now.  He would heal.  And Moriarty was incapable of hurting him ever again.  

He didn’t even mind using the warning.  When Sherlock started the dangerously restless pacing, pulling on his own hair hard enough to start tearing it out, or had played keep away, making John chase around and around the furniture trying to reach him so that he could draw him out of his head, it was crucial to be able to halt the self-destructive behaviour and redirect him.

And then had come the moment when John turned his back for just a minute, only to find Sherlock with a knife in his hand, in the process of bringing it to his own throat, and John knocked it away and slapped him—some things actually were completely unacceptable—before he even thought to consider.  It was a harder blow than intended in his panic, but it _worked_.  John’s heart broke a little more—and not just for Sherlock—at the way he accepted it without any attempt at defence or retaliation, the way he clung to John’s shirt as John assured him that he would get through it; that he would feel better; that John would do whatever it took to help him.   

A period of intense focus had followed the incident, while John sat with him, gently stroking his fingers against Sherlock’s cheek to remind him he was doing well until long after the redness there had faded.  When he finally trusted Sherlock to sit by himself for a few minutes, John pulled out the cutlery drawer wholesale, collected and dumped every sharp object he could find in the flat inside, and left the whole thing on the step outside for Mycroft to notice and remove from reach.

John didn’t have a staff of burly nurses or a padded room to ensure Sherlock’s safety as he faced his demons, even if he _had_ considered that to be the gentler route for this man who should never have been caged at all.  The next two times that Sherlock became disoriented enough to attempt to harm himself, a measured slap came more easily, before the threat became imminent.

There had been no call to use the last, and most disturbing, of Moriarty’s cues: the one that Sherlock called ‘You can’t live without me’, but John had internally dubbed ‘Sleeping Beauty’ because apparently unless he was kissed he would fall unconscious from the panic of it.  Sherlock fortunately never reached a level of disorientation that it was necessary for John to sink to that level to reach him.

But whatever reservations John had nurtured about the ethics of the situation or the efficacy of Sherlock's plan, for now, it had been enough.  

While John worked unacknowledged and apparently unnoticed, verbalising and validating Sherlock’s emotions as he kept him from succumbing to despair amid their storm and fury, Sherlock had worked on his own near-insurmountable task. As always, he had risen to the challenge.  

He looked past his own suffering and fought it all back, bit by bit, to reach the core of himself underneath.  Piece by piece, the Sherlock John had once known started to emerge.  No shallow copy who flinched at shadows and grasped at security objects, but _Sherlock:_ cold and incisive, controlled and commanding.

And then on the fourth day… John had been drowsing in the armchair, emotionally and physically drained from being on constant alert for another outburst requiring his intervention, when he startled, abruptly aware of a presence looming over him.

“John,” said Sherlock, pulling John the rest of the way out of his doze.  He was holding two fresh cups of tea.  Muzzily, John took one and drank, almost melting with pleasure at the taste he’d missed so much since Sherlock had been…  

John looked up at Sherlock in shock.

Sherlock took an ostentatious sip of his own tea, then smirked.  “I’m _back_ ,” he said.  “Oh, and by the way…” he called over his shoulder as he headed back into the kitchen.  “I’m looking forward to resuming our conversation.”

Which was… more than somewhat premature.

However great his faith in Sherlock’s mental magic, John wasn’t naive enough to believe that his abrupt recovery could possibly be that simple.  And however glad he was to find that Sherlock apparently considered that his mind had been successfully returned to his own control, that was hardly the only injury Moriarty had inflicted on him—it was simply the only one that Sherlock appeared to think relevant.

John had held Sherlock's broken heart in his hands these past four days.  

Bloodied to the wrists, hands as steady as they had been in any low-tech army hospital, John had worked to staunch the flow and hold the edges of the wounds together, as he encouraged and soothed and hoped and held the harm at bay.  He'd kept it beating while Sherlock worked to put everything back where it belonged.  

As soon as John had wrapped his mind around what it was that he was seeing, any fear that Sherlock had ever truly considered him on level with Moriarty was swept away.  It was a humbling privilege to be granted insight into this part of Sherlock that he himself seemed to consider with such wary disdain, but had nonetheless tried to shelter, in his roundabout way, from Moriarty’s influence.

John had borne stolid witness to the fear and anxiety, the anger, the overwhelming helplessness, the self-doubt and the sadness and the _shame_ ; the soul-deep grief and despair that had torn Sherlock apart no matter how he claimed he’d been protected.  

But even though Sherlock hadn't wanted to face the emotions—knowing Sherlock, he would probably never again admit that he even had them—he'd allowed them out without dissembling.  He'd shared them openly, trusting that John would understand what he scorned, and would support him and pull him back if he ventured too close to edge of the abyss, even as Sherlock had absented himself into his mind, apparently too busy to pay heed to what he considered a weakness of his transport.  

If John thought about it that way, perhaps this therapy path that Sherlock had devised, while undeniably unconventional, was not too far from the realm of what might have helped a more ordinary man.  Perhaps, no matter the elaborate stories Sherlock told himself to gain the illusion of control and dignity, this entire plan of his was merely a different way of framing the normal recovery process of a traumatised mind, giving himself an excuse to be irrational enough to feel and reach out, even if he couldn't admit how much he needed to.  

John swore to himself never to raise this theory with Sherlock; a placebo worked best when its function remained unchallenged.

But healing had to be more than just a single marathon surgery, reassembling torn pieces into their correct places and pinning the tattered flesh together.  And even if Sherlock didn't seem to consider it important that he’d been hurt in deeper ways than just his ability to master his own reactions, John wasn’t going to forget that while the pain might have been lessened by the catharsis of being released for a moment, that pain had merely been leashed and locked away rather than consciously acknowledged and accepted.

John certainly wasn’t about to have what looked like it might be the single most important conversation of his life—with the only person, as it turned out, that it had ever really mattered to have it with—while Sherlock was still too turned around by Moriarty’s mind games to be honest with himself, let alone with John.  

But John wasn’t worried anymore; he had held Sherlock’s heart, and he’d felt the strength of its beat.  Sherlock would find healing in his own way, in his own time, but he would heal.  And for this, John would have all the patience in the world.

He'd redirected Sherlock’s prompt with a comment about how there were more important things at the moment than examining the state of their relationship; Sherlock’s sidelong look made it clear the deflection had been noted.  John braced himself for the next attempt, and it wasn’t long coming.

Sherlock’s next project was to test his responses to Moriarty’s cues, to find out to what extent they still affected him.  John didn’t mind testing the ones he’d already used. Sherlock sent him a contemptuous look at the firm pat to the cheek John gave him in lieu of a slap, but didn't press it.  But at the last one, John had baulked at Sherlock’s obvious attempt to engineer an intimate situation.

It was so typical of Sherlock’s simplistic view on human interaction to imagine that making John kiss him to halt a panic attack before it could progress to unconsciousness would open the floodgates and force John to reveal all, despite the complete inappropriateness of the situation and Sherlock's obvious state of continued emotional compromise.  

“Don’t you have enough data from the other ones?” John tried.  “It seems you’ve done a pretty good job mastering the reflexive response, even if you _do_ have an internal reaction.”

“This is the most deeply embedded of all, John,” Sherlock argued.  “This was his _goal_ all along.  Do you want the moment when I find out whether or not he succeeded to be when I have unwisely chased some variety of criminal into a trap and been cornered?  And instead of fighting for my _life_ I have to choose between passing out or attempting to make _love_ to him?”

“Well, it would certainly give you the element of surprise…” smirked John, rolling his eyes as he gave in to the logic despite his internal skepticism.  That _hadn’t_ been how Sherlock had described that cue before.  Was Sherlock expecting to engineer even more than a kiss here?

“As long as it isn’t a surprise to _me_ ,” said Sherlock.  “You were a soldier; if there’s a problem, I’m sure you can fend me off long enough to preserve your virtue.  Don’t mind me, I’ll just pass out on the floor.”

Well, if Sherlock expected that kind of passive aggression to force John across _this_ moral boundary and engage in any kind of intimate touch, lips or otherwise, then he was going to be surprised.  Still, Sherlock was right; he _did_ need to test the cue in a safe environment, before some two-bit criminal ambushed him in an alleyway.  Fortunately, there was a doctor present, and John had been qualified since long before Moriarty had installed his shortcuts.

Panic attacks weren't dangerous; as soon as a person fell unconscious, the medulla oblongata took over control of respiration, and breathing returned to normal. All John needed to do was make sure Sherlock didn't hit his head on the way down.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Sherlock prompted, impatient with the delay.

John approached and laid a hand delicately on the long column of Sherlock’s neck.  Sherlock’s breath hitched slightly, but his gaze remained calmly locked with John’s.

“Squeeze.”  Sherlock raised his chin imperiously.

John gave him a dubious look, but applied a gentle pressure, mentally making ready to step back and allow the coming panic attack—whether real or imagined to force John's hand—to run its course, steeling himself to watch Sherlock in distress without intervening.

Sherlock’s breath stuttered again, and then evened.  “Fine,” he said, pulling away.  “I’m fine.”

John was reluctantly impressed.  And that, apparently, dealt with the elephant in the room as far as Sherlock was concerned, because he didn’t try to bring it up again.  

But John was left with the unaccountable feeling that he’d missed something.

Sherlock spent the next six days in his usual crime-solving mania, constructing great collages over the walls and tables, flicking through clues in his mind palace, going missing without a word for hours and returning without explanation, refusing to eat or sleep, sending John on incomprehensible errands around the city, and complaining that his questions hadn’t received a fast enough response without even noticing that John couldn't possibly have heard.

If Sherlock _wasn’t_ completely better, he was certainly doing a good job of acting the part.

Until, out of the blue, Sherlock nearly gave John a heart attack with a blunt announcement that Molly was dead.  Only actually it seemed that Sherlock had only assumed she was, thanks presumably to some manipulation of Moriarty’s.  

Sherlock flailed in uncharacteristic confusion for a few short moments, obviously having trouble wrapping his mind around the absence of a fact he hadn’t doubted…  Then he reanimated, a manic facsimile of himself as he dragged John away from his still-brewing tea, downstairs and out the door without explaining another word.  

It was a familiar scene, one they had played out a hundred times before at the breakthrough moment of a case, Sherlock heedless in his enthusiasm of the fact that John would be more than eager to go if he was only given the chance.  

This time, though, he was somehow... off.  As though he were acting the part, and not with his usual finesse.

By the time John had managed to fight his way free of Sherlock's attempt to bundle him into his coat, put it on properly, and follow, Sherlock was already holding open the door of a taxi as he dialled a number on his phone.  He stepped in after John, called, “New Scotland Yard!” to the driver, then his call connected.

“Lestrade!  I need you to arrest Molly Hooper.  ...  Yes, from the morgue at Barts.  ...  Oh, what do I care, make something up.  She signed my death certificate.  Forgery and doctoring evidence should do it.  ...  Yes, I _know_ that.  …  And that.  …  She won’t ask for a warrant; she’s trying to seem innocent.  …  Just put her in an interview room, explain the charges.  Play them up a little—jail time, medical licence, etcetera—rattle her cage, and tell her you’ve called me to come and help sort it out.  ...  Well, call it return of a favour you owe me.  …  The one where I spent eight months in hell and _you_ don’t have a bullet in your head!  …  Would I ask you if it wasn’t?  ...  Yes, yes, all right.  But _yes_.  This is vitally important.”

John raised his eyebrows at Sherlock as he disconnected the call and threw down the phone, but Sherlock didn’t meet his gaze.  He looked out the window, staring fixedly, his eyes seeing…  John wasn’t certain what, but he was fairly sure that it wasn’t visible to anyone else.


	8. Lying Beneath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty dreams, Sherlock doesn’t drown, and the truth comes to the surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again much thanks for betaing and cheerleading to Megabat. :)

_The lullaby had a slow, lilting tune._

_Sherlock knew better than to ask about it—he wondered, in fact, if Moriarty was even aware he was singing as he washed Sherlock’s hair, massaging creamy foam into his scalp.  Mostly it was just a near-subliminal hum, but occasionally there were some murmured lyrics: mixed English, Gaelic and mumbled nonsense words as though he couldn’t quite remember how it went.  Something about treasure, my love, and closing your eyes for a present._

_Clearly, Moriarty’s mind was miles away—or more probably years ago—as he performed the mundane task, paying less attention to Sherlock than he might if he were washing a car._

_Sherlock didn’t try to attract his attention back; invisibility might not be safety, but it was as close as it got, and if this simple compliance was currently satisfying Moriarty’s need for his companionship, then that was all to the good._

_At a tap on his shoulder, Sherlock obediently slid forward along the bottom of the bathtub, leaning back to let his head rest in the water between Moriarty’s thighs.  He tried to breathe evenly, watchful eyes fixed on Moriarty’s face as the other man gently ran his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, stripping the suds away._

_Another breath and barely a moment’s notice to hold it, before a delicate change in the set of Moriarty’s fingers sent him fully under, the water’s distortion making the lullaby warble strangely._

_Their eyes met through the moving prism of water, Sherlock’s pulse holding steady._

_Moriarty watched him with a curious tilt to his head, as though considering anew what would happen if he didn’t allow Sherlock up again.  If he simply held his gaze serenely while the ripples died and the water went cold._

_This would be how, one day, Sherlock’s life would end.  Oh, Moriarty may well kill him in a fit of rage, but it was far more likely that one day he would casually, and without premeditation or regret, kill him with his bare hands solely because he could.  Sherlock knew that would have been the way all young Jimmy’s toys went as a boy: broken calmly, curiously, and without expression.  Simply breaking them to watch them come apart in pieces, and then to be abandoned._

_He was a psychopath.  And psychopaths got bored._

_A change in the whisper-soft pressure of the fingertips on his scalp gave Sherlock permission to surface, and he took a grateful breath.  “Thank you,” he used it to say, and he meant it._

_It was a strange sort of gift to know his life had been held in the balance for a moment, and then found worthy and returned to him.  He_ was _grateful, and he had to admit flattered, that Moriarty still found him interesting enough to invest time in.  Interesting enough to release up out of the water.  Interesting enough to smile at and reward when he behaved well, to punish when he displeased, to expend his pleasure in, and to orchestrate a complex system of guards and locks to ensure he had Sherlock, and would always have Sherlock._

_Sherlock wouldn’t resist on the day that he realised he’d become boring enough to be allowed under the water for the last time.  What would be the point?  Besides, it would be a mercy.  A shortcut exit from Moriarty’s elaborate web; still bound, but no longer bound to struggle._

_Moriarty hummed a pleased sounding acknowledgement and the process repeated: the conditioner smoothed through, down into the water for a rinse, and then the order to submerge._

_Sherlock remained under for longer this time, Moriarty’s face suffused with peace as he watched.  The water stung in Sherlock’s nose, his diaphragm spasmed and his throat ached from the pressure of his ribs trying to expand against a vacuum._

_When Moriarty indicated he could come up, Sherlock gulped his first deep breath barely above the water level, droplets of water burning into his lungs along with the air.  He coughed and spluttered, gripping the side of the bath and hacking to clear his windpipe._

_Moriarty watched him regain his equilibrium before he prompted, “What do we say, darling?”_

_Sherlock turned to face him._

_“Thank you, Daddy,” he said hoarsely, but no less sincerely._

_“There’s a good boy,” said Moriarty, stroking Sherlock’s cheek and drawing him in for a gentle kiss.  Then he leaned back against the rim of the bath, spreading his knees wide under the water.  “I think you can go longer if you try, don’t you?”_

_His fingers threaded loosely through Sherlock’s hair, tenderly weaving silken strands in an insubstantial snare._

_“Deep breath for Daddy, now…”_

_Moriarty let his head fall back, and began to sing again._

***

Molly looked very small huddled in a chair in the interrogation room, toying with her necklace.  

Sherlock had been staring at her through the glass for almost five minutes.  John still hadn’t managed to talk to him.  He’d been immersed in his mind palace for over an hour while they’d waited for Lestrade to bring her in, his eyes staring blankly ahead while his fingers twitched in the air and his face travelled the full range of unguessable micro-expressions.  

His eyes were looking back out of his mind again now, flickering over Molly, taking in a thousand small clues in her appearance and body language.  

John narrowed his eyes at her, attempting to see what his friend saw.

She was fidgeting.  So, she was nervous.   _Obvious_ , sneered the Sherlock in John’s head.  Her damp hair was pulled back into a ponytail.  Right.  She was wearing a floral blouse, cardigan, trousers and sensible shoes, and a sparkling pendant that, despite her fiddling with it, John eventually managed to work out was of her initial.  Well, that was no help.  Work clothes, minus the lab coat.  Of course they were work clothes, it was eleven o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday; she’d been pulled from the morgue.  John tried to look more closely.  Her clothes were a little rumpled—and a bit tight in places, as he was sure Sherlock would be tactless enough to point out—but he couldn’t see any meaningful dirt or tell-tale rips.  He was hopeless at this.

Finally, Sherlock nodded.  “Just as I thought.  You can watch,” he warned Lestrade, “but don’t interrupt.  I mean it: this is national security.  Whatever you think you are seeing, I will not touch her.  I will not even approach her.  I give you my word.”

Lestrade looked more concerned rather than less at Sherlock’s reassurance.  “Of course I’m going to watch.  You’ve hijacked our interview room and our resources to arrest a seemingly very nice woman on trumped up charges when her only crime was doing you a favour.  I’m not making any promises!”

“I’m assuming the video recorders are on; if you still don’t like what you see after you understand the whole of it, I’m sure Donovan here,” he gave a sneer in her direction, “will take great delight in assisting her to press charges afterwards.   _Do not_ interrupt.”

John caught Sherlock’s elbow as he swept out the door.  “Be kind, Sherlock.  She looks sad.”  And that was interesting, because until it was out of his mouth, John hadn’t noticed himself noticing that, but it felt true nonetheless.

“If she cooperates.  But she won’t.”  He sighed at John’s dubious look.  “This will not be kind, John, but it is necessary and it will be… _good_.”

John let him go.

Lestrade gave him a mildly panicked look, which John returned in equal measure, but they both turned to watch the performance.

Sherlock strode through the doorway into the interview room, making Molly jump, although he didn’t appear to notice.  His forceful presence showing no sign of the hesitance that had marked him over the past two months.

“Good morning, Molly,” he said.  He slid off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair opposite her before sitting down.

“Sherlock, thank God you’re here!  This is horrible!  I’ve never been arrested before, I’ve never even had a parking ticket!  I don’t know what to do!  Should I get a lawyer?  Does that make me look guilty?  I mean, I am, I guess, I’m not trying to lie.  Obviously you’re not dead, but I didn’t mean—”

“I apologise for the inconvenience,” Sherlock interrupted her rambling.  “I would have warned you this might come up—the investigation is all a necessary part of my officially coming back to life—but I never seemed to run into you at the morgue.”

“I don’t actually live there, Sherlock.  I’ve been on leave—and this morning I thought my first week back couldn’t get any worse.  I knew I was risking my job and my licence, but the inspector told me that I could go to jail!  I can’t go to jail, Sherlock.  I _can’t_!”

“It won’t come to that.  I wouldn’t let you get into trouble just for _helping_ me.”

Molly’s fingers went to her throat, tugging nervously on her necklace.  “I know you wouldn’t—won’t.  Thank you.”

“My condolences,” said Sherlock.  Molly dropped the pendant instantly.

“Wha—what?”

“Your lover.”  Sherlock nodded to the pendant.  “Recently deceased.  Although your mixed feelings suggest you may be better off without him.  He gave you that necklace you’ve been pulling on so hard that it’s cut into your neck.  A two carat flawless diamond with aquamarine.  Youth, purity, hope, and eternity—describing you, I’m assuming?  Very flattering.”

“I don’t... I don’t know what you mean.  I haven’t had a date in ten months.  You can ask anyone.  This is cubic zirconia.  I bought it on sale.”

“No, it was a gift, and a valuable one,” said Sherlock in the slightly confused tone he got when he couldn’t understand why someone would deny the obvious and wasn’t going to let it drop.  “It’s not your style, but you wear it anyway.  Sentiment.  A butterfly, I could believe you'd chosen—girlish, a desire to transcend self-perceived plainness—but an initial is self-confident, satisfied, ostentatious.  Ah, perhaps an initial you share?  He told you it was instead of a ring.  That your relationship had to stay a secret to protect you, or he would have married you.  Did you ever ask why he had a ten thousand pound diamond set in silver?  Tarnish, second place. Betrayal.  It’s an unusual choice.  Does that describe him, or is it also for you?”

“Stop it, Sherlock!   _Please_ , just... just leave it.”

“Sherlock,” muttered John from behind the glass.  “Bit not good.”

Sherlock nodded, as though he’d heard John’s admonishment, and touched his fingers to his heart.  “My apologies.”

“Thank you,” said Molly stiffly, relaxing a little.

“So, the charges.  Evidence tampering is blatantly ridiculous, given my death wasn’t actually a criminal case.  The falsification of documents should be easily dismissed under a duress clause, given your actions were necessary to preserve my life and the lives of four others, including yourself.  You did the right thing, Molly.  The _only_ thing that allowed us all to survive.  I don’t believe this will ever go to trial, nor have any consequences for your medical licence.”

“Thank you, Sherlock,” sighed Molly, almost limp with relief.  “I’m so glad you’re on my side.”

Sherlock brushed at an irritation on his check and leant forward, fixing his eyes on Molly.  “I will always be on your side, Molly.  And I was wrong about him, you know,” he said, nodding toward the necklace she’d started pulling at again.

Molly dropped it like a hot coal.  “Thank you.  I appreciate that.”

“He _wasn’t_ gay.”

Molly went white.

“Dear God, Molly,” breathed John, confusion suddenly coalescing into sickened understanding as he stared at the sparkling M pendant.  “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Sherlock, I—”

“He wasn’t gay,” repeated Sherlock.  “He was a psychopath and a sexual sadist, who didn’t much care the gender of his partner as long as they were suffering.”

“He _wasn’t_!”

“John, what is it?” asked Lestrade.  “Do you know what’s going on in there?”

“Her boyfriend,” said John, gesturing helplessly.  “She was still seeing _Moriarty_.”

“They were harmless games, at first,” Sherlock pressed, unbuttoning his cuffs and folding them back.  Molly sucked in a breath and held it.  “Playing that he was me.  Me.  With a riding crop.”

“You _can’t_ know that!”  Molly’s eyes were wide with horror, her cheeks crimson.

“Only he turned it around, didn’t he?” said Sherlock, holding her gaze, unrepentant at the increasing depth of her dismay.  “Insisted it would do you good.  Convinced you.  Even though you’d never imagined you could hurt someone you cared about.  That’s why you think he wasn’t a sadist—but he would never have been so _boring_.”

Sherlock watched her struggle for composure for a moment with an expression of mild interest, head tilted to one side, before continuing.  

“He was _good_ at playing me, wasn’t he?  The intense focus.  The deductive insights.  The lightning changes.  The manipulation.  The casual cruelty.  He _loved_ it.”  Sherlock drew his fingers down the side of his face again, more slowly, the uncharacteristic mannerism making John frown as he noticed Molly unconsciously imitating it.  “He could reach into your head and pull out your darkest fantasies, your deepest fears, your most painful regrets.  He could peel you open and make your soul bleed with shame, and he could convince you that you enjoyed it.  By the time you realised that he wasn’t playing, that his _other_ face was the mask, he had his hooks deep into your whole life.”

“It wasn’t like that!” insisted Molly.  “He—he wasn’t always kind, but he _loved_ me, and I loved him.”

Sherlock casually placed a hand at his neck, and if John hadn’t noticed the way the fingertips fitted precisely over the memory of now-faded bruises, if he hadn’t seen for himself the way Sherlock had avoided contact with his own skin even when he’d demonstrated the cue to John, he would have thought the motion entirely natural and uncalculated.

Molly clutched her throat like a mirror, nearly hyperventilating with fear.

“Not good!” whispered John.

“What is he _doing_ to her?” demanded Donovan, baffled.

“He’s… he’s unbelievable!  He’s feeding her the cues Moriarty trained—”  John broke off, biting his tongue.

“Trained?”  Donovan’s tone dripped with loathing.  “You mean he _trained_ her like a _dog_?  That’s disgusting!  Of _course_ the freak would think that was fantastic fun to play games with.”

The cues Moriarty trained _him_ to respond to, John didn’t finish.  The cues _Sherlock_ still can’t help responding to.  You ignorant, judgemental bitch, he didn’t add.  “He _really_ wouldn’t do this unless it was necessary,” he said finally, hoping he was right.

“I believe that you loved him,” said Sherlock.  He kept his fingers at his throat, caressing lightly.  Transfixed, Molly did the same and then wetted her lips.

 _Hard to translate,_ John remembered Sherlock calling that cue.   _You can’t live without me._  But that was before he’d fixed his head.  He’d explained it was a cue for a kiss, then, but when he’d asked John to test it, he’d said… to _make love_.   _This was his goal_ , he’d said.  He’d already told John that Moriarty had only considered his body a means to an end.  

John remembered Sherlock’s face, deliberately blanked as John had placed a careful hand on his throat to test the cue: his breathing hitching, his pulse fluttering under John’s fingertips, his pupils dilating, his chin lifting proudly as he denied its pull on his body... and on his heart.  

And John thought that, perhaps, he understood what Sherlock had been trying to demonstrate to him. Perhaps Sherlock hadn't been ignorant of the worst part of the problem between them after all.

“I'm _certain_ you loved him,” said Sherlock, on the other side of the mirror, his voice hypnotic, his hand fixed to his throat.  “He was very good at establishing attachment in others... but he wasn’t capable of returning it.  That necklace wasn’t sentiment; it was a reward.  Thirty pieces of silver to the betrayer, in exchange for giving him _me_.”

“No!” shrieked Molly, tearing her hand away from her neck as she leapt up with a clatter, her chair toppling over backwards.  “God!  No, it _wasn’t_ for—  It was for Mo—  I didn’t _give_ you to him!  I only did what _you_ ask—”

Sherlock drew his hand back fast and Molly _flinched_ and stumbled, giving a little cry as though he had struck her from where he sat, two meters away and with a solid table in between them.

“Not _good_ , Sherlock!” groaned John.  Beside him, Donovan vibrated with outrage.

Molly watched Sherlock’s hand as though it were a snake as he calmly lowered it to the table.

“Do you think _he_ would have let you get away with that explanation, Molly?  I’m not wrong about what the silver meant to him.  But I don’t blame you.  You _did_ do exactly as I asked—exactly as _he_ had asked you to.  Or…”  

His eyes narrowed at her for a long moment, flicking from her face to her necklace, to her wringing hands, and back again.  Then his expression cleared.

“Oh, I see.  I hadn’t realised.  It was _you_ who asked _him_ , was it?   _Daddy,_ ” Sherlock leaned forward, widening his eyes as he breathily drew out the words one at a time, _“Sherlock Holmes is so_ very _mean to me.  Please will you_ fix _him for me?_ ”

“No,” Molly whispered.  “No, no, no…”  Visibly, she pulled herself together, forced herself to stand upright.  “ _No_.  That wasn’t it, Sherlock.  I would never have.  Not to you.  Not to _anyone_.  You’re wrong.  Only an _awful_ person could ask for that.”

“And of course you aren’t an awful person, ergo he loved you.  I can see we aren’t going to get anywhere like this.”  

Abruptly, Sherlock stood and began unbuttoning his shirt.

Molly jumped at the sudden movement, nervous eyes tracking his fingers as they released the second button and moved to the third.  “What… what are you doing?”

“No need to be shy; you spend your days examining naked dead people.  You’ve had me up on your slab before, for Mycroft to identify my body, and I know you took a peek while I was under the anaesthetic.  You haven’t forgotten the view.”

“I _didn’t_!  I mean... no more than I _had_ to, I mean...  I would _never_... _look_!”

“Really, there’s no call for embarrassment,” he said blithely, untucking his shirt to undo the last few buttons.  Molly couldn’t retreat any further, pressed as she was against the wall behind her.  “I practically gift wrapped myself; I hardly expected you to forego the opportunity.   _Daddy_ certainly didn’t.”

“Sir,” Donovan was whispering urgently to Lestrade, “if you don’t put a stop to this, I will.  This is clearly sexual harassment and intimidation.”

“I don’t think that’s where this is go—” John tried to interrupt, but Donovan cut over him.  

“It’s _way_ over the line.  This woman’s already the victim of one psychopath, I _won’t_ stand by and let another one—my God!”

Sherlock shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the ground.

Molly gasped, a hand covering her mouth and the tears that had been shining in her eyes spilling over in silent rivulets.  

Sherlock spread his arms to the side and performed a slow turn to showcase the mess of scars that littered his torso: some white and old, some still pink and raw in the early stages of healing, some raised and puckered, some so fine they were only visible in the way they cut across others, some the long ridges of a whipping, some the shiny smears of burns, some the serrated oval rings of bite marks.  In the sick pit of his stomach, John knew that the vivid picture still painted on Sherlock's skin showed the barest fraction of his suffering.  John hadn’t seen the scars for over a month, not since Sherlock had draped himself the wrong way over a kitchen chair and wordlessly allowed John to remove the last of his stitches.  They were healing well.

“Bloody _hellfire_ ,” Lestrade swore quietly.  “‘Witness protection’ my _arse_ , that monster had him, didn’t he?  That’s how he knew how to cue her.  He’d been ‘training’ _Sherlock_ , too.”

“You’re the pathologist, Molly,” Sherlock was saying evenly.  “You’ve seen bodies like this.  I know they break your heart.  There’s no need to lift the sheet; you already know what the rest of the examination will show.  Your eyes went straight to counting the bite marks, because you know his habits.  You know what they mean.  How many do you have, Molly?”

Molly gave a tight, frantic shake of her head that sent a spatter of tears flying.

“Of course he wouldn’t often have left scars on you.  Your accommodation had windows and a door; it amused him to maintain the illusion that you could walk away if he pushed you too far, as much as it amused him to remind me that I couldn’t.  But I’m sure you have a few, because he _liked_ to bite.”  Sherlock brushed his cheek and bared his teeth in a mirthless smile, making Molly shudder.  “It was never so much a punishment as a way of keeping score—a commemoration of a perfect moment of pain.  Like…”

He paused for a moment, as though considering.

"This one,” he decided, tapping a faint oval scar on the underside of his left forearm, as clinical and dispassionate as he ever was in deducing the history of a corpse at a crime scene, “for attempting to shield my face, when actually, he was ecstatic that he’d managed to make me feel humiliated enough that I’d tried to hide the tears.  Or this one.”  He indicated a mark in the hollow of his hip, just visible above the waistband of his trousers.  “My first time.  I was barely conscious after he’d taken his own pleasure; I couldn’t hold back from begging him not to do this to me, too.  Of course, he kept me on the edge for an hour after that, told me I ought to be grateful someone was finally willing to indulge a pathetic virgin freak who clearly wasn't as asexual as he’d thought—”

“No, Sherlock…” moaned Molly softly.

“—as though I couldn’t clearly see that my confusion and terror were what aroused him most of all.  I actually passed out when I climaxed; when I came to he'd already started raping me again.  And then of course there’s this.”  

Sherlock reverently laid his fingers over a livid mark at the base of his neck that was only barely covered by his collar most of the time.  

Molly bit her lip.

“I suspect you know this one.  I suspect he gave it to all his lovers in the same place.  I’m sure you don’t need me to explain how even with everything he did to me, even knowing everything that he was, it didn’t always feel like it should have, did it?  That’s what John has trouble understanding; for him it's black and white.  But you, Molly… you’ll understand.  You’ll believe me when I tell you that, however much I’d tried to prevent it, however much I hated him, by the end I truly did lov—”

“ _Enough!_  Sherlock, _please_.  I can’t bear that, too.”

John was taking shallow, even breaths in the silence behind the glass.  

“He’s definitely dead?” asked Lestrade finally.  He looked like he’d aged ten years.

“Very, very dead,” said John, wishing more than ever that he’d taken the chance to shoot Moriarty’s bullet-riddled corpse a few times himself.  “Sherlock’s handling it better now, too.  Not so much of a _victim_ anymore, if he’s up to admitting how much it hurt him, let alone exposing it in present company.”  He shot a vicious look at Donovan, who had her mouth shut tightly, looking sick.

“Of course, Molly.  If it bothers you, I’ll say no more.”  Sherlock slipped back into his shirt, and back into the soothing, semi-hypnotic tone of earlier.  He carefully folded his cuffs down and buttoned them, adjusted his collar to hide the last mark, and sat back at the table.  He cupped one hand at his heart as though cradling a child, while he brushed the fingers of his other hand up and down his cheek, over and over.   “I’m sure your—infractions—were different to mine, your path more subtle given our differing circumstances, but I thought you might recognise the emotions that excited him.  I only mention it so you’ll realise that I truly do understand what he did to you.  What he did to us both.  I’ve already said I don’t blame you.”

There was a long pause, in which Molly blinked at Sherlock, her gaze still wide and distraught on his collar as though the closely tailored shirt was no barrier to the horror her mind could see.  Then she covered her face with her hands, leaned back against the wall behind her, and wept.

“God help me, you must,” she sobbed.  “You _should_.  Oh, God, I’m so _sorry_ , Sherlock.  I don’t even know how it came to this, I’m sorry, I’m so, so _sorry_.”

“No, Molly,” said Sherlock.  “ _I’m_ sorry.  You were entirely defenceless against him.  You have no idea how sorry I am for bringing you to his attention, and for leaving you vulnerable.  The man was a master manipulator.  Bars or no bars, you were every bit as much a prisoner as I.”

Molly shook her head, frantic, and Sherlock cupped his hand to his heart again but this time she wasn’t watching.  “No, you were right, Sherlock, it was my fault, all my fault.  I didn’t _mean_ to ask him, I was just talking, you know?  I’d had a bad day and half a bottle of wine, and Jim was in a good mood and I was just _talking_ to him about work, complaining about something you’d said to me, it was just a _joke_! An awful, _awful_ joke.  I didn’t even remember _saying_ anything until after it was too late, and then Jim told me he’d done it for _me_... he’d risked going to prison to make _me_ happy...  And he said if anyone found out he had you, he’d have to kill you for real... and I didn’t know what to do, but I thought, ‘Sherlock’s smart, he’ll escape in a few days, he’ll probably think it’s a challenge,’ but then you didn’t! And I thought it would be a few weeks, then another few weeks, then maybe another month...  When I finally heard you were free, and Jim was dead, I just... it was all over and I couldn’t _bear_ the thought of you finding out what I’d done, so I thought I’d stay away and try to pretend it never happened and hope I never... never saw you... again...”

She began pulling at the necklace again as she dissolved into incoherence, raising a friction wheal on the side of her neck as she tore at the clasp, fumbled it, and lost it again.  Sherlock turned to the mirrored glass briefly, raising his eyebrows for implied permission to renege on his promise, then crossed the room to stand beside her.

He brushed a single finger down her cheek and she froze, the panic at bay. “Let me,” he said, plucking up the necklace with his thumbnail and forefinger, assiduously avoiding any touch to her skin.  He squinted briefly at the clasp… and undid her chain.

The pendant came away in Molly’s hand and she hurled it away into a corner of the room, and then seized Sherlock around the middle, sobbing as she burrowed her head into the hollow of his shoulder in a way that made John’s heart seize in recognition.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry—”

Sherlock’s hand came up seemingly of its own accord to cradle her head against his heart.  “It was _not_ your fault,” he said distantly.  “He manipulated you into thinking it was your idea.  He made you believe you were cooperating of your own free will; he made you love him.  But every move had been calculated by him.  He overwhelmed you with shame because it delighted him and because it strengthened his hold, and you were not responsible for what he did through you.  But if you still believe you need it… I forgive you.”

John wondered whether Sherlock knew who he was talking to.

Sherlock took Molly’s shoulders and pushed her far enough away that he could meet her eyes.

“Do you understand, Molly?  Jim Moriarty was not your friend.  He did not love you.  He was not doing you a favour, certainly not because of what I am sure was an extremely well deserved complaint about my customary rudeness.  He _used_ people, hurt them because it excited him to watch them suffer, and killed them without regret when he got bored.  But if he took the risk of not killing you back when you were the only person who knew I was alive—if he never came to me still tasting of you, smug in the knowledge that I couldn’t help but deduce your misery from his body, not even when he was sure enough that I was broken to stake his own _life_ on my obedience—it means that you were doing something useful for him, something too useful to risk me finding out.  You were _important_.  How, Molly?  What was it that you did for him?”

Through Molly’s wet lashes peeked a smile.

John turned to Donovan, who still looked like her tight-pressed lips might be the only thing preventing her from vomiting.  “You have just been very, _very_ privileged,” he said, “to see what it means to be a friend of Sherlock Holmes.  He is arrogant and manipulative and far too honest and completely oblivious to personal boundaries, and if he sees you hurting, he will _not_ be kind.  If he sees you hurting, he will look straight into your soul, find out what you need, and he will reach down inside you and flip the switch that brings colour back into the world.  He put himself into that hell to save Greg’s life, and mine and Mrs. Hudson's.  He cured my limp and PTSD when I was less than a month off eating my gun, and in my medical opinion he may well have just saved Molly from the same.  If you ever try to give him one of those cues, or use anything that he just revealed against him; if the video of this conversation ever sees the light, or if you ever,” John gave her the parade ground stare that made her gaze tremble in the attempt to break away, “and I mean _ever_ use the word ‘freak’ to describe a fellow human being again, I will submit a formal complaint the likes of which will _destroy_ your career and put you in sensitivity training until you are eighty.  Are we clear?”

Mutely, Donovan nodded.

“You saw all of _that_ ,” Molly was asking with an incredulous giggle and, as a dedicated adrenaline junkie, John knew the beginning of a letdown high when he saw it, “but you honestly didn’t see the most important thing?  You know, in a way that’s kind of reassuring.  I _can_ hide something from you.”

“There’s always something,” muttered Sherlock sourly.  “What did I miss?”

“ _Look_ at me, Sherlock,” she said, spreading her arms and twirling in a circle in an imitation of his earlier actions.  “You’ve been remarkably kind not to mention it—I’m assuming you thought it wasn’t relevant—but I’ve changed too.”

“Obviously you’ve been stress eating again,” agreed Sherlock.  “You’ve put on more weight than usual.  I’m sure he relished the subject.  Your clothes are tight across the breasts and hips, so you haven’t updated your wardrobe; you’re hoping to lose the weight soon, but that isn’t going well.  You went to the gym this morning, but you intend to go more regularly than you actually manage, perhaps because of the trouble you’ve had sleeping over the past six weeks since Moriarty’s death.  Early stage depression; they're common symptoms.”

“I haven’t been sleeping much the last six weeks, Sherlock, and I won’t say I haven’t been depressed.  But I didn’t go to the gym.”  She smirked, obviously enjoying the chance to bait him.  John had to suppose that long-term exposure to Moriarty might have inured her somewhat to Sherlock’s less malicious brand of indelicate honesty.  “I don’t even have a membership.  And I didn’t do any other sort of exercise, either, unless you count the stairs from dropping off at my mum’s flat on the way to work.”

Sherlock frowned.  “Your hair is damp from a shower less than two hours ago, and your clothes are severely creased from being wedged in a bag packed over a week ago.”

“Yes,” she said.  “I’ve taken to keeping a spare set of clothes in my car, luckily.  I didn’t want to do the stairs down and back to Mum’s again, so I showered in the on-call resident’s room.”

Sherlock considered that briefly, then pulled out his magnifying glass and crouched to look more closely at her shoes.  He leaned in and sniffed them, making Molly giggle again.

“Spare clothes,” he muttered, “but you haven’t changed your shoes.  Not coffee.  Milk.  Partly curdled with stomach acid.  Your mother insisted you eat breakfast, but you threw up ten minutes post-consumption.  The splashes are of varying age: not the first time it’s happened.  Are you experiencing an eating disorder?”

“ _I_ didn’t throw up, Sherlock.”

“Your mother, then,” Sherlock waved this away in frustration.  “How is this relevant?”

Molly shook her head, helpless with laughter.  “You see,” she choked out, “but you don’t _observe_!”

“All right, enough,” snapped Sherlock petulantly.  “I obviously don’t know; you’ve washed away all my evidence.  Just tell me.”

Molly strode over to the table and rummaged in her purse.  She pulled out her phone and, with a smile of genuine pleasure, showed Sherlock the image on the lock screen.

“Her name is Moira,” she said simply.

For a moment, Sherlock stared.  Then he began to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've got a moment to say hello in the comments, I would _love_ to hear from you. :)


	9. Immortality Part 1: Burn the Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty is a father, Sherlock is in love, and John is not—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Great thanks to Megabat for conspicuous betaing above and beyond the call of duty, and for talking me down from the panic attacks.

_“Congratulate me, Sherly!” crowed Moriarty as he waltzed into the room clutching a bottle of Louis Roederer in each hand.  Behind him, an underling pushed in a trolley holding two glasses and an ice bucket, and then silently vanished again._

_“Congratulations, Daddy,” repeated Sherlock from his seat, naked on the couch.  He smiled inwardly at the welcome sight of the other man.  It had been unsettling to wait for him alone, even if he had been left a task.  “What are you celebrating?”_

_“‘_ We,’ _Sherly, please.  ‘We.’”  Moriarty popped a cork and poured two glasses, licking the bubbles from his fingers as they overflowed.  “You can’t imagine I’m planning to drink all this by myself?”_

_Sherlock had hoped against the evidence.  This wasn’t the first time that Moriarty had required a drinking partner.  He was even more erratic when drunk, alarmingly so when Sherlock didn’t have the benefit of a sober mind to help him collate the rambling non sequiturs into some sense of what was coming._

_“What are_ we _celebrating?” Sherlock corrected himself, taking a tentative sip as Moriarty sank half a glass of obscenely expensive champagne like a competitor in a beer-drinking competition._

_“Immortality, my darling!”  He straddled Sherlock’s lap on the sofa, his free hand going to Sherlock’s throat, but he kept the caress light as he leant in for an exuberant kiss, his tongue cool with the taste of wine.  “Well, maybe,” he prevaricated, draining the remainder of his glass, then leaping up and heading back to the bottle for a refill._

_Hastily, Sherlock drank, too; he shouldn’t fall behind._

_“It’s a little early to predict the outcome yet, but... I must admit I’m more curious than I’d expected to see the results.  A complete unknown, you see?  It’ll probably turn out ordinary as usual, and then I’ll get bored and have to start killing people.  But I’ve outsourced the tedious parts so maybe not.  Oh well!”_

_Sherlock tried to make sense of this, and wondered if Moriarty had already been drinking before he entered, but dismissed the idea—steady hands, clear gaze, crisp articulation—no, the man was drunk on novelty, on a sudden influx of_ not-boring _into his life._

_“Sounds dull,” Sherlock probed carefully.  “Staying alive.  Although I suppose good news for the world at large.”_

_“Oh, that.”  Moriarty waved a dismissive hand.  “Yes, I’m sure the ordinary people will all be very glad to have my funeral postponed indefinitely, but you can’t have everything.  You won’t be around to amuse me forever; I need to get to work on my next project.”_

_That thought hit Sherlock abruptly: a sharp, swooping feeling in his chest.  His_ next _project?_

 _He hadn’t realised that Moriarty had become_ that _bored with the game between them, although perhaps he should have guessed.  The docile pliancy into which Sherlock had recently fallen made him little more than a convenient warm body capable of providing intelligent conversation.  It had been weeks since Moriarty had managed to truly hurt him to the core, in that way that brought a sparkle to the other man’s eyes and made his hands go terrifyingly gentle._

_Inside his mind palace, Sherlock touched his fingers to the chest of the comforting bust of Moriarty, wondering what the man would take from him next.  If Moriarty could already see the inevitability of the endgame so clearly, perhaps it would even be his life._

_Sherlock wouldn't mind terribly much if it was.  He was used to the mock-execution game by now, and never lost sight of the inevitability of it: one day the loaded gun or the poison pill Moriarty offered him to test his loyalty would be real.  Sherlock never hesitated, despite the way predictable animal fear flooded his body.  He still hoped that day might actually arrive before the game moved on from just the two of them; that Moriarty might simply dispose of him, as he’d promised, instead of broadening the players.  Still, it wasn’t particularly realistic to expect him to keep that promise._

_Sherlock had fought the hopeless battle for every step of ground as long as he could, as long as he dared.  Moriarty didn’t mind, not beneath the sadistic fatherly mask.  They both knew it was the battle he craved, not the result.  It wasn’t really disobedience to resist.  Sherlock was simply playing the game as Moriarty had planned for him, trying to retain Moriarty’s interest as long as he could—trying to_ prove _that he wasn’t boring—and letting Moriarty demonstrate how much_ better _he was; how ultimately tedious and disappointing that made Sherlock._

 _The battle for Sherlock’s body had been, as Moriarty intimated back at the beginning of his imprisonment, a non-starter.  Frankly, Sherlock couldn’t imagine why Moriarty hadn’t grown bored with that and moved on_ months _ago.  Moriarty’s obvious experience and skill in achieving precisely what he wanted from his partners made Sherlock ill-equipped to present any kind of true challenge.  Obviously Moriarty enjoyed the activity in a way Sherlock couldn’t entirely understand, but sexual promiscuity was part of the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy.  Moriarty was surely far from faithful outside the walls of Sherlock’s prison, but Sherlock had to assume that the particular thrill of steering an asexual through uncomprehending obedience must be approaching its expiry date._

_But with his physical submission so instinctive at this point, there was little more Sherlock had left to offer in the way of indignities or intimacies._

_There was more scope for movement on his cooperation in the Dear Jim cases.  Thus far, Moriarty had kept Sherlock’s involvement light; an invitation and a reward, rather than a requirement, and always as an arms-length theoretical exercise.  Sherlock had grasped at the dangling lure of mental stimulation eagerly.  It didn’t make any difference if he used his talents to help Moriarty or not.  Moriarty was perfectly capable of orchestrating crimes elegant enough to avoid the scrutiny of Anderson and his ilk without help; any extra flair added by Sherlock merely gilded the lily.  And it allowed Sherlock to learn valuable information about Moriarty’s network, to earn Moriarty’s trust, and to avoid going completely mad with boredom.  There was even the faint potential that he would be able to suggest a minor change to a crime that would ring familiar to Mycroft and raise suspicions about Sherlock’s death._

_But if Moriarty was growing bored, he would begin to augment his pleasure by escalating the cost to Sherlock._

_It seemed Sherlock’s hands were about to start getting dirty._

_Perhaps it would begin with a reward: allowing him the task of personally executing of one of the more aggressive torturers who made his life hell, for some small misdemeanour which had displeased Moriarty.  There was no harm in that, was there?  It would truly make the world—and Sherlock’s little corner of it in particular—a better place.  Later would be an innocent.  Probably one who would die either way, so no real harm there, either.  Perhaps torture for information.  Then simply for fun.  Rape.  People he knew.  Sergeant Donovan, perhaps.  Then people he actually liked.  Friends._

_Oh, there was years more pain to be forced on Sherlock.  Years more use to be extracted from him in roles for which he was eminently unsuited._

_At the end of the slippery slope, the ultimate test of his loyalty would be breaking down and training John himself for Moriarty’s pleasure.  Moriarty clearly knew what John represented to Sherlock, and despite the unreasoning hatred Moriarty nursed for the man—the epithets he used on the rare occasions he referred to John were laced with conspicuous venom—Sherlock had no doubt of their final destination.  John was clearly only enjoying a stay of execution while Moriarty prepared for the moment when he could force_ Sherlock _to destroy him himself—along with any last remnant of his heart and soul._

 _At some point before that, though, Sherlock would strike hard boundaries in his mind palace; lines he’d delimited as not just unpleasant or morally ambiguous, not just_ not-good _on the John Watson scale, but definitely uncrossable while he had any capacity to resist.  Lines that, once Moriarty eventually_ did _force him across them, would make it impossible for John Watson to ever forgive him._

 _Moriarty had never allowed Sherlock the comfort of denial, the pretty hope that this hurt was perhaps accidental, or that comfort lacking in an ulterior motive; this reward a genuine kindness, or that concession anything but the thin end of the wedge for another.  He constantly reminded Sherlock of the game they were playing, enjoying Sherlock’s appreciation of the subtle ingenuity of his methods almost as much as the way Sherlock inevitably succumbed to them anyway.  They both knew it was only a matter of time before he surrendered without reservation, despite the way Sherlock's mind railed against its own weakness._ _And when Moriarty forced him to strike the final blow against John, it would be in full knowledge of what it meant, with no way for Sherlock to hide from his own pathetic failure to put up so much as an interesting fight along the way._

 _For now, it was a comfort to know that when he struck those lines, he could still open the weathered oaken door into the rest of his mind to give himself the strength to say no.  When he did—when he successfully followed that decision through and Moriarty realised that he wasn’t truly broken, but merely biding his time, the man would be_ incandescent _with delight_.  

 _Then he would make Sherlock watch while he personally orchestrated whatever task it was that Sherlock had refused, bringing to bear the extra levels of sadistic skill that only he was capable of.  And_ then _he would begin the entire process of breaking Sherlock again, this time making_ sure _that he could have nowhere to hide.  No secret place, where he knew that he might_ not _do exactly as Moriarty willed, in the end._

_No.  Sherlock wasn’t looking forward to getting boring._

_“Where’s your mind gone, my dear?” asked Moriarty, suddenly back kneeling astride Sherlock’s lap, too close, sleeves pushed back before Sherlock had noticed, and this time the hand on his throat was close to choking pressure.  “It’s not allowed to wander away when it’s supposed to be here with_ me _.”_

_“I thought,” said Sherlock carefully, wetting his lips and trying not to gasp too obviously, “you didn’t like being unsure of the results of a game?”_

_“Oh!” crowed Moriarty, delighted.  “You’re_ jealous _!  How adorable.”  He swooped in for another kiss, swallowing any protest Sherlock might have given.  “Not to worry, sweetness, you’ll always be first in Daddy’s heart.”_

_“Comforting,” said Sherlock dryly, “but I’m fully aware that you don’t have a heart.”_

_“Ooooh, you’re a flatterer.”_

_“Are you saying that you do?  A squishy irrational thing roaming about where it pleases?  I don’t believe it.”_

_“Maybe I do,” said Moriarty slyly, with a cheeky child’s lilt.  “Maybe you just can’t find it!”_

_“And you told me I’d always be first.”_

_“Well,” he smirked, “I only said that to get you into bed.”_

_This kiss was more insistent, Moriarty rising on his knees and pressing forward, forcing Sherlock’s head to tilt back painfully to follow him.  Something hard made an impression against his chest and Sherlock took a moment to realise that it was a solid, rectangular outline in Moriarty’s jacket pocket._

_His mental processes abruptly kicked into high gear._

_Observation: a solid, rectangular outline.  Observation: the precise size and shape of a mobile phone.  Query: was this finally the mistake Sherlock had been waiting for?_

_There was one strict rule in Moriarty’s prison, and that was that there be, at all times, a minimum of two locked doors between any communication device and Sherlock Holmes.  Weapons were watched carefully, but not to the point that Sherlock wouldn’t be able to get one if he wanted to face the consequences afterwards.  Moriarty knew that Sherlock couldn’t hope to make it all the way to the exit with or without a weapon, and wouldn’t dare to attack Moriarty himself even at the cost of his own life, to avoid triggering the dead man’s switch._

_But any ability at all to communicate with the outside world, perhaps enlisting aid, would be too dangerous to risk.  No matter how broken Sherlock seemed._

_“Seems a wasted effort,” demurred Sherlock, his head spinning.  The lure of Moriarty’s own phone was almost too good to be true, but the man_ did _seem genuinely distracted by whatever the breakthrough on his new project had been, perhaps enough to have broken his own rule.  “I can’t say no to you.”_

_“You’re right,” smirked Moriarty again.  “The couch will do fine.”_

_He abruptly rolled them both, a sudden movement ending with Moriarty seated on the couch and Sherlock straddling his lap.  In the confusion of trying to follow the change of direction—hesitation, whether it was intentional or not, was guaranteed to spoil Moriarty’s good mood—Sherlock deftly maneuvered the jacket to fall open, away from Moriarty’s body, and insinuated his hand into the pocket._

_There was a brief moment as Moriarty unzipped and pulled Sherlock down onto him, burying himself deeply and abruptly._

_Yes.  It was definitely a phone._

_“_ Fuck _, that’s good,” said Moriarty, stroking Sherlock’s cheek with one hand as he encouraged the other man’s hips into the slow, deliberate motion he wanted.  “I didn’t want to wait today.”_

_There had been a bottle of lubricant and a few minutes privacy awaiting Sherlock in this room before Moriarty had arrived.  It had been more of an order than a hint—and a calming distraction from the jitters of waiting alone—but Sherlock felt a flush of warmth at the approval he’d earned._

_Was it a_ real _phone?_

_Swiftly, Sherlock frisked it with his fingertips, but didn’t fool himself that there would be any way he could tell it from a mocked up device designed to trap him into a mistake, if that was Moriarty’s aim…  It wasn’t an opportunity he could afford to pass up—but neither was it a decision he could weigh up in this crippled state._

_“Oh, you should have seen it, Sherly,” Moriarty murmured blissfully as he ran his hands feather-light over Sherlock’s body.  “The waves of pain, the fear of it, the_ blood _dripping on my shoes…_ _Wide open.  So fucking beautiful.”_

_Sherlock ignored the incoherent rambling.  Moriarty had clearly changed the offending shoes since; the canvas Sherlock could have used to deduce where he'd been and what he'd been doing before he walked into the room had been wiped as clean as it always was.  If Moriarty had actually wanted Sherlock to understand, he would have provided clues to deduce, not poetry._

_No, there was simply no other option.  He needed to_ focus _._

_He let instinct and conditioning take over, letting his transport follow Moriarty’s cues unguided as he looked into his mind._

_Carefully, he unlocked the heavy door in his mind palace, rust creaking in the seized up bolts.  Strips of caked on mould peeled and fell away from the crevices around the door as he cracked it open and slipped through. In here, his thoughts should be less affected._

_Was it worth the risk?_

_It was quiet on the other side of the door.  Empty.  Floodwaters had clearly seeped inside here, unnoticed; the walls and furniture moisture-damaged and peeling, if mostly intact.  Cobwebs swathed the ceilings._

_Feeling unsettled and oddly abandoned in the lonely passageway, Sherlock opened the door a little wider in his mind so he could still see the bust of Moriarty, letting more of his attention feather out towards the real Moriarty as well.  That helped._

_Outside, his body writhed to get closer against the thrusts._

_Moriarty hummed, approving.  “Again,” he ordered._

_Sherlock's body repeated the motion with enthusiasm.  Internally, Sherlock considered the puzzle in the other man's pocket objectively._

_The point was… the point was that he hadn’t learned everything there was to know.  He didn’t even really know what he did know, without having had a chance to analyse the information in an attempt to discern Moriarty’s plans.  But if Moriarty got bored, the information he'd gathered over the last eight months was possibly the only chance he would ever have to disable his network._

_Moriarty licked his throat obscenely and began to suck a necklace of bruises._

_It would cost Sherlock eight days in the sensory deprivation tank if it was a trap, and that would be the death of him; Sherlock knew that beyond a doubt.  Even if his body came out alive, his mind would be crushed; the barriers protecting his inner self would be swept away and overrun, leaving nothing but a body for Moriarty to execute and drop off on Mycroft’s doorstep.  Moriarty would do it, too.  He_ was _getting bored of this game with Sherlock.  He already_ _had a new project._

_Sherlock felt himself squirm again at that thought, and impaled himself a little harder than required, gasping as the suction at his throat developed teeth._

_If Sherlock_ did _successfully send a message, it was highly unlikely that Moriarty would survive Mycroft’s rescue attempt.  Sherlock would need to work fast to disable the doomsday plan Moriarty had in place in case of his death.  And there was the risk that they might_ both _die, leaving the world unknowing and unprepared for the global catastrophe to come._

_Sherlock abruptly recognised the pattern in through deep bruises Moriarty was sucking into his throat, and voiced a moan that seemed to come from deep inside, his head falling back in the pleasure of the moment._

_Champagne and conditioned arousal fizzed in his mind, compromising Sherlock’s ability to trust his own judgement.  And he couldn’t lock them away and concentrate, because the most important thing was keeping Moriarty happy—distracted—no,_ happy. 

_What_ was _this latest project of his anyway?  Would it… would it keep Moriarty away from him?_

_His body let out a needy sob as it tried to get closer again, making Moriarty chuckle against his skin._

_No, this was necessary.  Critical.  Sherlock was the only person with the knowledge of Moriarty’s network and understanding of his mind necessary to disable his plan, whatever it was.  This distraction, whatever its cause, may never come again and certainly not before Moriarty was finished with Sherlock and disposed of him.  It was time to start the clock._

_Sherlock let his body do as Moriarty willed, unheeded, as his fingertips moved over the phone, typing expertly without looking._  

> In the boathouse.  No reply.  SH

_Sherlock had been too innocent to understand what he was implying, at the Holmes family dinner, when he had deduced aloud that his elder cousin had changed her clothes in a teacher’s office the week before A-levels.  (Obvious: an unusual encounter he’d noticed at school where the teacher had personally returned her lost blazer, a furtive air to her behaviour afterwards, a nearly-brushed out pattern of chalk dust on her uniform skirt for which the only explanation was for it to have lain crumpled on the floor below a blackboard.)  Humiliated beyond endurance and terrified of the consequences her parents would bring to bear, she had locked the six year old Sherlock in the estate’s boathouse overnight.  Mycroft had been the one to find him the following morning, hypothermic and near-catatonic with terror._

_He was hardly an innocent in such things now—debauched and writhing in Moriarty’s lap, pressing his throat into the other man’s mouth and all but begging for more—but Mycroft would understand what he meant.  Or, convinced that the message couldn’t possibly be from the brother he’d long given up for dead, he would understand what Moriarty wanted him to_ think _it meant.  But there was no way around that.  Mycroft would play along to find out Moriarty’s game; arrange for the best team he had for that kind of legwork to act on the information.  He wasn’t stupid enough to underestimate Moriarty again; the rescue party_ would _make it through, even if they weren’t expecting to find anyone to rescue._

_Blindly, Sherlock entered Mycroft’s personal number, pressed send, and deleted the message.  He withdrew his hand from the jacket pocket and braced both hands on the back of the couch, giving himself better leverage to follow Moriarty’s guidance as the other man finished up the embellishments to his neck._

_Task complete, Sherlock swung the door in his mind palace almost closed, but left it ever so slightly ajar.  Whatever happened, it would be soon.  There was no more need to play the long game._

_Deliberately, as Moriarty’s eyes met his again, Sherlock arched his neck back, angling it to one side and then the other to display the artwork at his throat. He knew more than felt the positions of the thumb and the spread fingers, the frame of the palm, all picked out in developing shades of dark red and purple._

_It was a carefully calculated act; that was all.  A move in the game.  They both knew that._

_Moriarty laughed _anyway_ , low and warm, at the accurate deduction of his desire to see the handprint clearly, and rewarded Sherlock with the touch of fingers at his throat—fitting his hand over its dark shadow to give him permission for a kiss. _

_Sherlock felt the now-familiar emotion pull in his chest at the cue.  The man was a liar.  He was a consummate manipulator.  He was a true psychopath, incapable of love or even enlightened self-interest.  Incapable of feeling any human connection without finding someone to utterly destroy.  He was the only one who had ever consistently challenged Sherlock.  He was better at reflecting Sherlock’s feelings back to him slightly mislabelled than any psychiatrist he had ever fenced with.  A demon, who would have no heart but for the angel Sherlock had placed inside him to shelter his own heart—but there was no future there, either, was there?_

_And here—_ here _—_ _connected as intimately as it was possible to be with another human being, the invasion intensely too much, but also, Sherlock had to admit…_ good _—he couldn’t help but feel…_

_Sherlock wished he didn’t have to go._

_“I did have a heart once, you know,” confessed Moriarty, as their lips separated, his eyes glittering like dark stars.  “But I got bored and it had to burn.”_

_“Your mother,” said Sherlock.  His chest ached strangely with the desire show off for Moriarty one more time._

_“Mmm-hmm?”  Moriarty quirked his eyebrows, the shadow of anticipated pleasure lurking in his eyes.  Dance for me, Sherlock._

_“Moira Gillian Abbhain,” explained Sherlock, earning a glowing look.  “Young single mother, hardworking, well liked, loving and affectionate by all accounts to her ten year old son.  Their small house in O’Connell St burned to the ground when an electrical fire broke out and spread mysteriously quickly.  She was trapped in the bathroom—”_

_Moriarty gasped in obvious excitement at the memory, sending frission of cerebral transcendance all the way up Sherlock’s spine at the confirmation of his deduction.  The set of fingertips on his hips changed, spurring Sherlock faster and more forcefully down against him as Moriarty began to thrust upwards in earnest._

_“—the window too small to get out,” Sherlock managed, “the lock on the door seized up by the heat.  The fire department too late, caught up on another three simultaneous calls across town.  The police report seemed very sympathetic to poor newly orphaned young Richard James “Jimmy” Abbhain—from the Gaelic root ‘river’—who’d suffered only mild smoke inhalation but had been unable to do anything more than listen to his mother’s screams as she burned alive.”_

_Sherlock writhed again, purposefully.  Moriarty groaned, his fingers tightening for a brief moment before he allowed the pace to slacken._

_He cupped Sherlock’s cheek gently, eyes bright, and grasped him for a more intimate reward._

_Sherlock leaned into the touch, letting his eyes fall half-closed against the ecstasy of the other man’s approval.  “The fire was ruled accidental,” he finished softly.  “Idiots.”_

_“And I thought you didn’t know, darling,” said Moriarty, “when you only mentioned Reichenbach.  Naughty, naughty, keeping secrets from Daddy.”_

_“It was painful to omit,” agreed Sherlock, relaxing into the pleasure as it built.  “It wasn’t very hard once I had the accent, the clue about Carl Powers laughing at you, and the reference to burning.  It tends to be the mother with a psychopath.  Not to mention the blind old school teacher you killed, pretending you weren’t still making her repeat every word you said so you’d have an excuse to cheat and detonate her bomb anyway.  Too many clues; it had to be deliberate.  You were desperate for me to find you, so I didn’t let on.”_

_Sherlock smirked at Moriarty's narrowed eyes; in this moment the insult would be allowed._

_“_ _I didn’t believe in the computer code, either, _”_ he added.   _“_ But at that point, if you’ll recall, I _ wanted _you to underestimate me.  Didn’t seem much point bringing it up later.  ‘Look, I wasn’t quite as much of an idiot as I was pretending when I tried to fake my own death and condemned myself to a life as your chew toy.’  Doesn’t quite work as a salve to the pride.”_

_“Poor Sherly,” commiserated Moriarty, “nobody loves you.”_

_Sherlock stopped his face reflecting the stab of hurt that lanced through his chest at that—more than well enough to fool anyone else.  He braced himself as he saw Moriarty’s lips curl in satisfaction and dip to Sherlock’s neck once more.  The other man’s moans were stifled with clenched teeth and Sherlock’s flesh as he changed the rhythm to one that would finish them both._

_A few minutes later, Moriarty raised his lips from the bleeding skin: a bloody jewel he’d added to the bruised decoration drawing his hand around Sherlock’s throat._ _"The love bite,” he whispered reverentially._

_Moriarty rolled their hips together, keeping them joined despite the seeping fluids staining his suit.  He admired the bite mark for a moment, then returned his teeth to it, worrying it until Sherlock’s eyes stung with a pain that nearly drowned out the humiliation._

_“Aren’t you proud, Sherly?” Moriarty asked.  “Did you think you would ever truly earn that one?  I always knew you would.”_

_“I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to notice,” confessed Sherlock, the pain in his chest deepening.  Hiding it didn’t matter anymore.  When Moriarty discovered Sherlock’s betrayal—whether the phone was real or a trap, whether Mycroft’s rescue attempt went well or poorly, whether Sherlock’s mental protections had done the job or not—their little island of peace and safety was about to be torn apart.  “I don’t want you to move on to a new project, Daddy.”_

_“Oh, sweetheart.”  Moriarty smiled at him and brought him in for a chaste kiss.  “You really are upset by all this.  But you’ve got nothing to worry about.  Not with me.  You can make sure I don’t get too bored, can’t you?”_

_Sherlock smiled back bravely at the implied threat—but Moriarty’s expression had sobered._

_He was watching Sherlock intensely, his eyes shining with something unfamiliar._

_“I don’t want to get bored again, Sherly,” he said.  “I need you to make sure that doesn’t happen.”_

_Sherlock looked at him for a long moment, uncomprehending in the face of the hollow man he loved._

_“I’ll do my best,” said Sherlock at last._

_“That’s Daddy’s good boy,” said Jimmy Abhainn, and rested his head against Sherlock’s heart._


	10. Immortality Part 2: From the Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty is a father, Sherlock is in love, and John is not… entirely not gay.

“It’s been five years.  Will no one ever let me live that down?”

“Never,” giggled John.  He was sitting beside Sherlock on a bench at the children’s playground, in what had become their favourite spot to spend time in between cases.  “We’ll still be telling that story at Moira’s _fiftieth_ , Sherlock.  Come on, you know it was hilarious.  You had all the observations there, you just didn’t put it together for the obvious explanation.”

“I’ve never claimed to be impervious to error,” said Sherlock petulantly.  “Quite the reverse as you well know.  I’d eliminated the idea based on erroneous assumptions.”

“I know,” said John fondly, then he sobered.  “I can’t blame you for assuming _that_ wouldn’t have been part of his plan.”

“I think we are all agreed that Moriarty would have made a truly horrifying father.”  Sherlock watched John’s visible shudder at the thought, and considered that perhaps only someone who had been required to address the man as ‘Daddy’ could appreciate just how horrifying.  “But she did mean something to him, to whatever extent he was capable of that.  He found her interesting enough that he didn’t want her dead.  That wouldn’t have lasted.  And what other little girl gets to say they saved the world on the day they were born?”

John shot a look at her, squealing as she went down the slide with today’s playmate, well out of earshot.  “Sherlock, you’re not telling her—“

“Not yet,” agreed Sherlock, although he wasn’t certain that this was on entirely rational grounds.  “But it isn’t a good idea to keep the truth from her.  One day she’ll be curious about him, and Moriarty was always several steps ahead of everyone else—he’ll have left something for her.  Hopefully I’ll be able to intercept it and make it safe when the time comes, but she needs to know enough to protect herself.”

“You’ll be able to do it,” said John loyally.  “You beat him last time, and if you need to, you’ll beat him again.”

Sherlock smiled inwardly at John’s naïve faith.

He had once intended to delete Moriarty, once the threat had passed—to permanently close that unpleasant chapter of his life, a final insult to a man who'd wanted to be unforgettable—but that was no longer an option.  If there had been any chance that Moriarty may have one day given up his pursuit of Sherlock, there was none that he would do the same for his daughter, even in death.

John had seemed surprised at how readily Sherlock accepted the fact that Moriarty had disabled his own dead man’s switch at the mere sight of her.  Mycroft had certainly been dubious.  But the moment Sherlock held her, his remaining uncertainty had been swept away.

Sherlock hadn’t loved her, then.

Molly had slipped the sleeping bundle of blankets into his arms over his protests that it was unnecessary, arranging Sherlock’s hands so that the baby's head lay soft and heavy in his palm.  He held her for a few minutes—subtly examining the intriguingly thin plates of her skull as they flexed and shifted under his fingers, observing the heartbeat throbbing rapid and unprotected in her brain through the soft spot of her fontanelle.  Her frail neck rolled limply with his movements, utterly unequal to the task of resisting or even supporting the weight of her swollen head.  At that point, the disturbing knowledge that he could do anything, anything at all to this tiny fragile object had made him pass the baby on to John.

No, Sherlock hadn’t loved her.

But he had instantly recognised why Moriarty might have found his daughter compelling.  The man hadn't needed to go through his usual process to break her down and recreate her.  To make her love him, make her need him, make her _belong_ to him.

For him, this being that he had created, in her simple helpless trust, would have been already perfect.  

For her, the terrible part, of learning what that meant, would still have been ahead.

Sherlock’s moment hadn’t come until over a year later, on one of the many occasions between cases when Molly inexplicably dropped the baby off at Baker Street for a few hours.  John rolled his eyes at Sherlock’s habitual resistance and dragged him along with them, as usual, to the park.

John pushed the pram.  Sherlock walked beside him with his shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets—and then a sparrow swooped down ahead of them, snatched up a crumb from the pathway and departed again in a whir of feathers.

The whole thing was over in an instant, but the toddler leaned forward, straining against her shoulder straps as she pointed at the bare space and chattered incomprehensibly.  Her dark eyes sought Sherlock’s gaze, glancing back and forth to the empty scene of the marvel that had taken place in front of her, seeking his eyewitness testimony on the inconsequential incident.

A connection formed in Sherlock’s brain, pieces sliding into place in the sudden realisation that this tiny creature was a _person_ —not just an inconvenient bundle of reflexes and instincts and needs _in potentia_ —but already in evidence, her tiny mind scrutinising and theorising and collating the universe into a mental model filled with observations and conclusions and biases and irrational wonder.

That if Moriarty had somehow returned from the grave this moment and snapped his fingers, making a cluster of laser-dots appear over her heart, Sherlock would have gone with him more than willingly, because Moira was not replaceable.

And if it had been her that Moriarty had come for, Sherlock would have razed the world and everyone in it to the ground to prevent him from reaching her.

“Yes, Moira,” he addressed her, ignoring John’s abruptly raised eyebrows.  “There was a bird.  You can see, it left a feather just here.”

She chattered back at him, and he picked up the tiny thing to let her observe it more closely.  They continued the conversation as they walked: Sherlock pointing out the obvious implications of the feather’s condition and colouration, Moira wide eyed and admiring.

Moriarty had asked him to protect her from him—and when Sherlock had promised to do his best, he’d meant it, even if he hadn’t understood he’d been agreeing to anything more than prolonging their game.

Of course the promise wasn’t _why_.  But wasn’t it just like Moriarty, to engineer the situation such that Sherlock would do his bidding anyway?

Had he ever truly beaten the man?  Ever actually fooled him?  The ultimately willing compliance that had been Sherlock’s pretence of resistance: the concessions he’d made, the boundaries he’d gritted his teeth and crossed, the ones he'd allowed himself to _want_ to…  It would have been a source of constant delight to Moriarty, if he _had_ understood all along.

Had he been laughing at Sherlock’s efforts to deceive him the whole time?  Had Sherlock’s access to his phone truly been a mistake—a case of the overexcited impulsiveness that had been his only weakness?  Had Moriarty, with his games within games, and his intricate plans working uncountable moves ahead of his opponents, actually underestimated Sherlock enough to pass him a loaded gun in a room full of friends?  Or had he simply given his clockwork toy one last task—eliminate the greatest obstacle to his latest project’s chance for success; solve the _final_ problem—and set him free to perform it?

No, that wasn't possible.  Moriarty had never cared overmuch about protecting his own life—part of the thrill for him had always been to set things in motion and trust himself entirely to the complex web he’d woven around his unwilling targets—but in those final few minutes, he had held a gun on John, and genuinely considered shooting him.  

Sherlock had seen the calculation happening in his eyes, the honest contemplation of the possibility that it would be worth his own life to take out the man he had considered so disgustingly unworthy of Sherlock’s heart, the only man who had ever inspired such hatred in him and yet survived it.  

Moriarty had certainly known, however little he understood what drew Sherlock to him, that John was the only one who stood a chance of helping Sherlock to undo his months of painstaking work.

If Moriarty had always intended his own death, then why had he spared John when he had the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone?  Had he imagined that it would hurt Sherlock more to let John discover the depths of his broken mind, than it would to see John dead?  That he had damaged Sherlock too deeply for even John to heal?   Had he predicted, once Sherlock was revealed as a pathetic, ordinary man within the idol who had drawn John to him like a moth to a flame, that John’s admiration for him would wane, or curdle to pity?  That the remnants of Moriarty’s abuse would forever stand between them in silent, mocking tribute to a dead man’s genius?

Not enough data.  That bothered Sherlock.

Perhaps Moriarty had known it would do that, too.

Perhaps it didn’t matter.  Moriarty was dead; _he_ didn’t matter anymore, whether Sherlock could finally delete him or not.

John apparently hadn’t minded.  He’d been shocked, actually, when Sherlock made a snide remark to the effect that, without the ability to wipe Sherlock’s mind clean of the man’s influence, _John_ would clearly be forever unable to forget him.

But it seemed that by solving The Case of the Dead Man’s Heart (as John had rather erroneously taken to referring to it, despite sparing them the associated blog entry) Sherlock had jumped through whatever hoop it was that John required, and he was ready to make a frank admission regarding the whole not-gay issue.

“Sherlock,” he said, seated across from Sherlock in his armchair, “you don’t need to _delete_ Moriarty before we finish that conversation.  Frankly, I’m terrified of what that might do to your brain, so please don’t.  And I’m not expecting you to be fully recovered first, either.  I wouldn’t put that kind of condition on you even if it _were_ realistic.  I can see that you’re much improved, now.  Integrating things.  And I did understand what you showed me.  With the love cue.  That was… good.  But are you sure you’re ready for me to add another complication to everything?  I’ll wait as long as you need.  I’m not going anywhere.”

“Of course, John,” said Sherlock, biting his tongue against the statement that wanted to follow it; that he’d never not been _ready_ —what a ridiculous word—to find out something about John.  It felt like, perhaps, that might result in the retraction of John’s offer.

“Okay,” said John, looking at his hands.  “Okay.  If you say so.  Let’s talk.  Because, because there’s something I promised myself I’d say to you, if I ever got the chance, and… I guess this is that chance.  God, I owe Stumpy _so_ many beers.”  He took a deep breath.  “So, I’m… I’m _not_ gay.  But I’m not blind, either.  Or an idiot.  What it did to me when, when… you died…”

He seemed to be struggling for words, struggling to look up from his hands as they clenched and unclenched from one another on his knees.  

“Your limp came back,” Sherlock prompted.  “And your tremor.  You missed me, because I’m exciting to be around, and you need that in your life.”

“No,” John denied it.

Sherlock gave him a patient look.

“Well, yes,” he admitted.  “But that wasn’t all it was, because Mycroft got me the job with Stumpy’s team, and that managed to stop me from doing anything stupid, gave me plenty of excitement, and purpose, and… comrades at arms.  And they were great.  They _are_ great.  But it wasn’t…”  He sighed, struggling again.  “Enough,” he eventually decided.  “It was life support.  It got me up in the morning, stopped the drinking.  Well, most of the drinking.  Distracted me from thinking about my gun so much.”

Sherlock’s stomach dropped as the unacceptable implication of that hit him.  It seemed that was another one he owed Mycroft.  At this rate he was going to end up working for the British Government full time.

“But I was so alone, even in a crowd.  Every day, every hour of every day, I thought, I thought if only I could have had another chance, if only you were still alive, I would have… let you know.  Stopped being such a coward.”

He pressed his fingers into his eyes for a moment, obviously experiencing residual emotion from the time.  It seemed to be pulling a mirror response from behind Sherlock’s own eyes, and in the back of his throat.

“I probably would have moved on, eventually,” said John.  “I told myself I would.  People do, eventually, even from… from the love of their life.  Only I’d realised too late, and I thought that maybe if you’d known, maybe if I hadn't been such an _idiot_ , maybe you wouldn’t have…”

“I _didn’t_ , John,” said Sherlock in the silence, unsure what else to say.  John’s pain was like a physical thing in his chest.

“But I _thought_ you had.  For you, it was just a trick—at least that part of it was—but for me, it was very real.  And it was only then that I found out I’d written off something true, something undeniable, just because it didn’t quite fit in the box I’d imagined for it.  When you came back, obviously I couldn’t say anything, there wasn’t any place for… that.  You needed a friend, not a… another burden.  I probably still wouldn’t be saying anything if you weren’t such a persistent bastard, but…  You’re right.  He shouldn’t be allowed to take this from you, too.  Take the right to know the way I feel about you, and the right to decide what to do about it.  So.  There it is.”

“There it is,” repeated Sherlock, not sure what to do with _it_ now that it was _there_ , and John was clearly upset about it.  “But you’re… not gay.”

John groaned and clutched his head.  “No,” he said, as though it was a failing.  “Honestly.  It’s fine if I am, I’m just... _not_.  I’m pretty sure I’m not even bisexual.  But I meant it when I said that sex isn’t, isn’t about... slots and tabs—it’s about wanting to be close, just one more way to enjoy someone’s company—and I _like_ that.  I _like_ making that connection.  I can’t imagine not… not _wanting_ that, with someone who was, was everything to me.  With you.”

John looked down at his hands again, and then confessed to them, “I want to reach out.   _Want_ to touch you.  To be closer.  Maybe the rest is just friction.  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  Maybe I’ll find I can’t deal with that part.  Or maybe you will.  You might decide you really are asexual, or not interested, or put off the whole thing for life.  You might not want to be anything more than flatmates and friends, and I’m fine with that.  But I won’t be looking for any more girlfriends, not now I’ve realised I’ve got nothing left over to give them.  And if you want to explore that path, explore whether that’s something that you could enjoy, perhaps find out what, what _else_ we could be to one another… if you _actually_ want that, then… then so do I.”

Of _course_ Sherlock wanted that.  Clearly, John was more of an idiot that Sherlock had realised.

And so had begun the mind-numbingly slow but surprisingly not-boring process of walking John through beginning a homosexual relationship.

John seemed very tentative even at the very first steps.  Sherlock found this somewhat confusing, given that those first steps couldn’t possibly be so different to what Sherlock knew was a wealth of experience at relationships, even if they hadn’t been with men.  John had been responsive, apparently eager to reciprocate, but reticent to initiate, and seemed to feel the need to constantly check that whatever was happening was acceptable to Sherlock.  (Yes, John, _obviously_ , can we _please_ just keep going?  Now?)

For a while, Sherlock had been proud of how considerate he was being, remembering not to push John, to accommodate his jumpiness—keeping it to near-platonic touches, restrained if not entirely chaste kisses, avoiding any unnecessary looming or the undeniably male press of lower bodies.  

It was nice.  Rewarding, to be allowed to reach out to John without excuse, to duplicate that strange physical connection he’d only ever made with Moriarty in his false guise of kindness.  

As much as possible, given John’s strange passivity, Sherlock carefully adopted a receptive role, orchestrating the more masculine position onto the other man: tucking himself under John’s arm on the couch, tilting his face up into their kisses, or pillowing his head in John’s lap.  

He found it suited him better that way, in any case.  Moriarty had rarely been physically imposing or assertive in their interactions; once his initial work had been done on Sherlock’s mind, he had far preferred to place Sherlock in the more proactive role, where he could subtly control his actions from beneath.  Sherlock hoped that John’s uncharacteristic hesitance, so reminiscent of the deferential sham that Moriarty had employed, would pass soon.

Their wary circling of each other lasted until their next big case—the first _real_ one since Sherlock had been back, and a particularly satisfying one.

It took Sherlock a mere three hours to track down the poisoner who’d been lacing over-the-counter medications in stores across London with strychnine, killing seven people and hospitalising four more.  They intercepted him leaving his flat with a bag full of more drugs to insinuate onto shelves, and the police still ten minutes away.  When they cornered him, he brandished a syringe he’d been using to doctor the blister-packs and demanded to be let pass.  The syringe was nearly empty, but still looked to contain more than enough poison to be fatal.

Immediately assessing the situation and without a glance at John, Sherlock drew himself up.  

He took a few forceful steps towards the man and, loudly, began to list the deductions that had led them to him.

The precisely shaped ring of distributors who’d carried tampered products—which _looked_ almost geographically random on a map, but which was centred exactly twenty-five minutes via public transport from his home.  The chemical composition of the vintage rat poison that led him to four potential online retailers, only one of whom specified the deadly ingredient in the search results summary.  The delivery that retailer had made to an address right in centre of the sweet spot.  The owner of the address they’d found dead in her apartment, obviously the unnoticed first victim of poisoning, as though killing her was enough to stop _Sherlock_ from finding him.

Shocked and enraged at Sherlock’s increasingly insulting remarks about the blatant incompetence of his attempts to conceal his identity, the man yelled at him to shut up, advancing.  

Sherlock wisely retreated in the face of the strychnine solution dripping from the point of the needle, unwisely unceasing in his insults.  

The poisoner followed Sherlock, passing by the short, quiet man in the cable-knit jumper, dismissing him as a threat, presenting his back…

And in a moment, for him, it was all over.

Sherlock didn’t even pause in his litany of the man’s idiocy and hubris as John took him down and kicked the syringe away.  The dead woman’s phone password was easily deduced from the numeric portion of her computer passwords, listed on a note stuck to the frame of her monitor.  Her address book contained the name of a neighbor on the short list of suspects Sherlock had already given the police, a list he’d created from the acquaintances of the only victim with a heart condition.  That victim had taken the aspirin that killed her on a daily basis, and thus was the most likely to have been a deliberate target at the centre of the killing spree.  It was only a matter of time before the police had got around to her ex-husband as the obvious suspect, and only a matter of luck that Sherlock and John had found him via other channels first.

“You’re _brilliant_ ,” breathed John at the trail of deductions that there’d been no time to share with him along the way.  He was just barely panting from exertion, his eyes gone dark as they fixed on Sherlock with a wolfish, predatory grin, his face shining with naked admiration—the thrashing murderer still pinned face-down in an arm lock on the ground beneath his knee—and at that point Sherlock’s heart may have actually stopped for a moment.

When Lestrade finally arrived to put the man into custody, they were both high on adrenaline, exhilarated with success, drunk on Sherlock’s genius and John’s adulation, euphoric with John’s forceful takedown and with Sherlock’s renewed wonderment that anyone could be so willing to fight or kill to protect him from harm, that any such perfect contradiction of danger hidden in plain sight could genuinely exist, that this killer-healer considered Sherlock not a freak, not a useful tool, not a frightening invasion of everyone’s privacy, not a toy to be used and discarded, but _brilliant_.  That such a man could have chosen _Sherlock_ to be his friend.  His friend, and maybe more.

Sherlock was barely able to concentrate well enough to rattle off a list of chemist’s shops to search for tampered packets, and a reminder to suggest that all the murderer’s family and acquaintances discard the contents of their medicine cabinets in case of further grudge poisonings.

After a tortuous five minutes attempting to get a statement out of the two of them on the citizen’s arrest itself, Lestrade gave up and sent them home with a promise to stop by the Yard in the morning.  He exchanged an incredulous look with Donovan, who held up her hands in complete refusal to comment.

They avoided eye contact in the taxi, but Sherlock could see—in the way John’s fists curled and uncurled on his knees; in the way he licked his lips and pulsed his jaw muscles; in the micro-expressions of tension and uncertainty, determination and expectation; in the way he kept Sherlock in his peripheral vision, twitching towards looking at him constantly but always catching himself before he turned fully—that he knew as well as Sherlock did where this would end.

They made it inside, through the front hall and up the stairs, and Sherlock shut the door slowly, carefully.  Then he shoved John hard up against it, crowding into his space, holding his face in large hands and kissing him breathless without waiting for a protest he knew he wouldn’t hear.  John stood firm—not resisting, but matching him, not yielding, but meeting it as an equal—and Sherlock’s throat and chest burned with the joy of it.

“Say it again,” Sherlock said, tearing his lips away for a moment.

“Brilliant,” said John, eyes aglow, and kissed him again, devouring Sherlock’s mouth without a trace of hesitation, as though it was as necessary as breathing.  “ _Fantastic_.”  He gripped Sherlock’s shoulders, pulling him down to mouth his way along the jawline, and leaned his face into the contact to let the vulnerable skin around his eye rasp against Sherlock’s faint beard shadow.  “Phenomenal,” he breathed into Sherlock’s ear, then busied himself licking and suckling at the lobe.  “Extraordinary.   _Magnificent_.”

“John,” said Sherlock, knowing no more endearing word in the English language than that.  His knees were becoming unstable.  “ _John_.”

John eased them down together, sliding his back down the door to the floor, groaning at the way Sherlock spread his legs to bracket him against the door and settled snugly into his lap.

“God, Sherlock,” he whispered as Sherlock ground down against him.  John arched up to meet his lips, unflinching at the press of a body so different from any of his previous partners.  “You’re incredible.  Spectacular.  Amazing.”    

“John,” said Sherlock, unsure what would actually emerge from his mouth if he let any other word escape.  They fit perfectly, slotting together, sliding and thrusting, and the cloth that separated them didn’t seem to impede either one.  “John, John, John.”

“Oh, _God_ , I want you,” groaned John, clearly almost overcome.  He threw his head back against the door with a thump, eyes closed and gasping with the effort of restraint as his fingertips dropped to rest at Sherlock’s hips—not pulling him closer as was written in desire all over his face, but settling as delicately as a row of butterflies, accepting the way their bodies moved together without demanding more.

And at the unnatural inhibition in that touch, at the obvious dissonance of intention and action, the memory of another affected mannerism rose unbidden in Sherlock’s mind.

Sherlock went rigid where he was as the sensation of Moriarty’s guiding hands on his hips abruptly became doubled with John’s, the contact faint as cobwebs but constrictive as steel bands.  

Hastily, Sherlock closed off the welter of confused emotions that came with it; they were irrelevant.  Moriarty was dead.  John was here.  John was _allowed_.

He shook off the moment in an instant, but John was already releasing him, palms open and hands spread unthreateningly downwards, his eyes abruptly sober on Sherlock’s face.

“Not good?” John asked, without apparent judgement.

Sherlock frowned at him, understanding suddenly dawning.  “You haven’t been being hesitant because I’m a man,” he said, accusingly, pulling back a little to look at him properly.  “You’re holding back because you think if you don’t, you’ll remind me of _him_.  You’ve been being _careful_ of me.”

“Yes, Sherlock,” John said, rolling his eyes to the ceiling as he rested his head back on the door.  His arms struggled for somewhere to go, unable to close his body language or find a suitable place to rest or retreat with his back to the door and Sherlock hovering close over his lap.  “I didn’t think that was a secret.  I can and will look after myself, even if I’m pretty sure at this point that I’m not going to mind what or how we do _anything_.  But I _have_ to be careful of you, because you refuse to be careful of _yourself_.  Am I wrong? You would have just kept going, wouldn't you? You wouldn't have even let me see, if I hadn’t been watching for it.  Even if I was making you feel awful.  Even though we’d _specifically_ talked about how I need to be sure that you’re not doing anything you don’t want.  You promised me, Sherlock, _promised me_ you wouldn’t let me hurt you!”

They’d had a full on screaming row after that.

Well.  Sherlock had mostly done the screaming, starting with extended accusations along the theme that John was regretting the change in their relationship, that he wouldn’t take Sherlock’s word for it that he was _better_ now, that he still wouldn’t believe Sherlock had regained capacity for consent, that he was treating Sherlock like a child incapable of making his own decisions, that he was sublimating his sexual identity crisis into a feeling of guilt for taking advantage, that he was always going to consider Sherlock primarily a _rape victim_ and not a lover, that he was just one more doctor in a long line who thought Sherlock needed _fixing_.

He built up from there until he was hurling every unpleasant detail he’d ever deduced about John at him: his abusive father, his helpless mother, his jealousy of the attention that Harry’s perennial acting out garnered from their mother, his hopeless attempts to protect her from the attention it garnered from their father.  The gambling problem that had taken hold during the monotony of medical school.  The credit card debts that had sent him into the army to try to get a handle on it but that he still hadn’t cleared.  The way even Afghanistan hadn’t been thrilling enough to stop him wiping out every second paycheque on the day it arrived.  The temper that he feared would make him like his father, so much so that he avoided all personal conflict.  The way his lust for adrenaline had turned him cold on every workable relationship he’d ever had.  His most shameful sexual fantasies.  The lives he’d taken.  The lives he hadn’t taken quickly enough.  The patients he’d sent home in pieces.  The patients he’d lost.  The ones that had been his fault.

Sherlock watched himself doing it as though from a distance, unable to understand either of the men in the room.

John just sat there on the floor, an immovable object in a cable-knit jumper, being _careful_ and _sympathetic_ and _understanding_ and not even twitching towards the cues that he knew _perfectly well_ would help Sherlock to calm down.  He spoke only to interject quiet comments about patience, and trust, and getting there, and honesty, and working together, and never needing to do anything anyone wasn’t comfortable with ever, and making sure that everyone was always dancing in fields of fluffy bunnies and sparkling unicorns all day long, until Sherlock could _finally understand_ the previously unimaginable reasons why John’s brainless girlfriends had given up on him, just so they could stop listening to this _meaningless drivel_.

After he ran out of deductions, Sherlock threw himself on the couch and curled into an accusatory ball, nose and knees buried together in the back of the seat, back rigidly arched towards John at the other man’s refusal to cooperate with the obvious course of action.

What did John _want_ from him?  It had been over a _month_ since the man had finally admitted that it seemed he might be willing to try not being entirely not gay, at least where Sherlock was concerned.  An anomaly.  Just like John was for Sherlock.  Sherlock had rather liked that idea.

Had John decided that it wasn’t working after all?  That Sherlock was too damaged?  If Sherlock could turn back the clock and make it all go away, then he would, but it was impossible to delete it now, with Moriarty’s sword of Damocles hanging forever over Molly’s daughter.  And John had _assured_ him that didn’t matter.

Hadn’t it been going well?  Hadn’t they wanted the same thing?  Was he really so awfully different from a woman, that John couldn’t just _keep going_?  He hadn’t seemed put off by the unmistakable contact of Sherlock’s arousal—quite the reverse, at least until Sherlock had become momentarily distracted.

Why was John being so difficult?  What did it matter if Sherlock had a passing thought of something irrelevant to the situation at hand?  Did John imagine that he would _ever_ be able to fully quiet his mind?  Even Moriarty hadn’t expected that of him.  

Sherlock was _fine_.  That sort of thing had never stopped proceedings in the past.  He could have controlled his reaction, if John had forgiven him that single moment of confusion.  It was _transport_.

He lay there, trying to make sense of nonsensical preconditions, listening to John’s deep, deliberate breathing across the room—the way he didn’t even move from his seat on the floor, head tipped back against the door—and felt himself settle out of the corner of his mind palace where the shaking had sent him, back into his body again.  

A few minutes passed, and Sherlock realised that the tension in his back had leached away slightly, the emotions settling and changing.  He opened and closed a few doors in his mind palace, sorting the events and considering them dispassionately.

“You can go,” Sherlock said quietly, eventually.

“I’m sorry?” said John, still unmoved from his seat against the door.

“I’m just thinking, now,” said Sherlock, not moving either.  “Back in control.  You don’t have to worry, it won’t trigger anything else if you go for a walk.”

“I always worry about you.”  There was a long moment, and then the sound of John unfolding himself, standing up.  “But all right, it might be a good idea for me to clear my head.  I could do with a bit of a think about some of that, too.  Long as you’re okay.”

“Fine,” said Sherlock.

The door didn’t open.  Footsteps moved over to the couch, and fingers smoothed Sherlock’s hair back from his forehead, John's touch an unmistakable, reassuring pressure on his scalp that sent goosebumps down his spine as the strands of hair resettled.

“I’m glad you’re back,” said John.  “You make my life better, just by being here.  The rest of it will sort itself out, you’ll see.”

Then he went downstairs and out for a walk.

Sherlock never got John’s limits.

He puzzled over the mystery of him for a long time, until after the flat went dark and John came back with containers of Thai and bullied him into watching the implausible show with the aliens that surely even _ordinary_ people couldn't fail to observe.

It was then, watching John crow over stealing the last fish cake, laughing something about how Sherlock had failed to deduce _that_ , at least, that the understanding came.

John was _just the same_ as Moriarty.

Sherlock’s emotional state had mattered to Moriarty, deeply.  Particularly during any kind of sexual activity.  Of course, _Moriarty_ had been a sadist—he’d wanted to stare directly into the core of Sherlock’s hurt and anguish, to nurture it and savour it as it grew—but John… John was, deep down, a romantic.  John wanted to see something different—to nurture something different—something that swelled as naturally when Sherlock was with him as the distress had done with Moriarty.

All Sherlock had to do was let him in.  

He’d done it before, because he’d had no other option, because he’d needed to if he was going to solve the case, because he’d been too broken to fix himself without help.  It had been uncomfortable.  Exposed.  Even with only John, whose very presence carried enough stolid safety to defang Moriarty himself.  But…

He _could_ do it.  If that was what John needed from him—if it was something he could give back to John in part exchange for all the things that John gave to him—then Sherlock would open the doors wide and let him live there.

And when Sherlock kissed John again, licking into his mouth rich with salt and lime and laughter; when he pulled John into his bedroom, putting him back against the door as he investigated every wrinkle and blemish in glorious detail with his eyes and his lips; when John smiled, the wonder as Sherlock explained his deductions washing away the residual tightness in his eyes from the memories; when he breathed ‘Brilliant’, and Sherlock tasted the shape of it on his tongue.  When Sherlock’s shirt fell to the floor, and John’s hands skimmed across his scars, not fixating or avoiding or ignoring, but accepting them as just another part of his history.  When he stopped trying to goad John into action and confessed that the worst part had _always_ been the way that Moriarty’s invisible leash and gossamer touch had forced Sherlock to lead the way.  When John accepted that without argument and pushed back, pressing Sherlock down firmly against the bed, strong and close and confident, all passivity gone and only _John_ remaining.  When Sherlock arched up against the solid warmth because even then John was _still_ too far away.  When he took John deep inside his heart and his body and called him soldier and doctor and mysterious and intriguing and inexplicable and dangerous and conductor of light, and _brilliant_ …

Well, from that point, things had proceeded much more smoothly.

“Aren’t you two just a picture,” interrupted an elderly lady, settling herself onto their park bench beside John.  She had three—no, four—cats, at least two separate sets of great-grandchildren, and apparently no sense of personal boundaries.  

Sherlock glared at her.  There were _three_ other benches free, none of which required striking up a conversation with strangers.  

“It’s lovely to see some dads here at the park, and here together, too.  I always think the ones who have to try harder to create their family value it more.  I’m here babysitting for my granddaughter and _her_ wife, and you wouldn’t _imagine_ the trouble they’ve had getting things going with their Ellie.”

She indicated a child who had clearly dressed herself, and with significantly less attention to detail than was Moira’s habit.

“I’m not actually…” John trailed off abruptly as Sherlock gave him a look.  The habitual denial, and John’s subsequent embarrassment, had become almost endearing at this point.  Almost.  “Her father,” he finished weakly.  “We’re just babysitting, too.  Moira’s over there on the swing, in the rainbow shoes.”

“Oh, I’d guessed that, dearie.  It’s lovely the way they adopt causes from the adults in their lives, isn’t it?  Not an ounce of prejudice in any one of them, unless they’re taught.”

“No, they’re…”  John sighed.  “Just shoes.  She’s _five_.  She likes rainbows.  They’re all she’ll wear at the moment.”

“If you say so, dearie.”  Sherlock was beginning to come around to liking the nosy old bat.  “I’m sure it’s nice to have someone to spoil, anyway.  Never thought about adopting yourselves?”

John looked mildly appalled look at the thought of fitting a child in between crime scenes and kidnappings and body parts in the kitchen appliances.  “I don’t think children would fit with our lifestyle,” he told her.

“Oh, I see!” she said knowingly, and gave them a lecherous wink.  “Our girls aren’t into _the scene_ —I suppose that makes a difference.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh, _yes_ , daah-ling,” shammed Sherlock over the top of him, shuffling memories and closing himself into—ha!—a closet with them.  He extended a limp-wristed hand and shifted his posture in several small, carefully calculated ways to go with the affected musical tone.  “We have _far_ too much fun to _ever_ restrict our _lifestyle_ to the bedroom.”  

"Hoo hoo, I can see you've got your hands full!" said the lady, elbowing John in the ribs and cackling with delight.

"Definitely,” said John.  He gave Sherlock a repressive glare, which really had only one response.

Sherlock confided in a stage whisper, “Last night he had to use the handcuffs again, because I’d—”   

“Sherlock!” hissed John, correctly guessing that Sherlock’s disingenuous story was only going to get worse.  “We work with the—” he tried to explain, hideously embarrassed, but the old lady just laughed delightedly, giving Sherlock another R rated wink.  

Sherlock returned it, fanning himself ineffectually with one hand.

“I’m sure I don't need to hear any more details!” she said.  Her wrinkled eyes sparkled as she pushed herself creakily back out of the seat.  “Good luck keeping tabs on this one, dearie,” she addressed John.  “I think you’re going to need it!”

“I—” John tried.

“I certainly _hope_ so,” said Sherlock over the top of him in mock anticipation, and wiggled his fingers at her in dismissal.  “Ciao!”  

She shuffled off to bother someone else, and Sherlock widened his eyes at John.  “Whatever’s the matter, daah-ling?  Did I say something that upset you?”

“You’ve made your point, Sherlock.”  John looked deliberately away.  “And you’ve certainly made _her_ day.”

“You deserved it,” said Sherlock, dropping the act.  “Not gay indeed.”

“Sorry,” John conceded the point, a little shamefaced.  “You know it’s just a reflex now.  Not like it ever made any difference, anyway.  No one ever believed me once I’d fallen for you, not even those poor girls I tried to date.”

Sherlock was somewhat mollified by this.  “No, I suppose they didn’t.  No matter how persistently you tried to convince them you were unattached.  Although I’m sure you could pull quite easily now, if you started walking down here by yourself with Moira when she visits.  You’d be quite the catch as the single dad.  You could settle down, find yourself a nice woman with a boring name—”

“Mary, maybe?” suggested John, getting into it.  “It’d be nice to have another M name around the place.”

“—get married, knock her up with a kid of your own—”

“—run my own general practice clinic.  She could be a nurse, for all you know—”

“—work long hours to keep in business, spend the rest of your time with your family, give up on running around all over town after me—”

“—start limping around all over town instead, spilling everyone’s drinks again—”

“—focus on refusing to prescribe antibiotics for the sniffles, remembering birthdays and anniversaries—”

“—die of boredom within a week.”

They grinned at each other, the edge of the giggles bubbling up at the absurd story, the ridiculously unsuitable life for John.  The minor disagreement was forgotten.

“Cheer up, John,” said Sherlock, seriously.  “Perhaps she would have turned out to be an assassin in disguise.”

“I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thank you,” said John, picking up Sherlock’s hand and lacing their fingers together.  “It’s extraordinary, you know.  Quite extraordinary.”

They sat for a while, watching the children play, watching Moira chattering excitedly to another girl as they negotiated over some variety of pebble that had apparently acquired the status of a precious stone.

“She’s right though,” John said, “it is nice to have Moira around.”

Sherlock couldn’t deny that.  There was something compelling about her, about seeing the world through her wondering eyes and watching her construct her own self, one decision at a time, connections in her brain reinforced and pruned as she explored and experimented and gathered experiences.

She was bright, there was no doubt.  Brilliant, in fact.  Perhaps as much so as her father.  And lonely.  It was hard to make friends when the idiots around you couldn’t keep up.  It was hard to want to.  Not everyone found their John.  Nor was their Work so benign.

As they watched, the negotiation escalated and Sherlock saw Moira’s playmate draw back and say a short word, the shape of it in her mouth too familiar to Sherlock, before throwing the contentious pebble down into the mud, sending a spray of dirty splatters all over Moira’s favourite rainbow trainers.

Moira’s eyes tracked the pebble down to the ground, took in the brown stains on her beloved shoes, then she raised her face to give the other girl a heart-stoppingly familiar glare.  Slowly and deliberately, she pushed her sleeves back.

Sherlock carefully didn’t flinch.  Some neural pathways, it turned out, took quite a bit of time to overwrite.

So many forks in the road ahead of her, still.  And if she went wrong… if she went wrong, would Sherlock be able to stop her?  Would he be able to try?

“Do you ever worry,” Sherlock asked quickly, before the momentary urge that had finally brought the question past the tip of his tongue and out into the open could pass, “that she might turn out like _him_?”

John frowned at him in confusion, before he turned back to look at Moira, crouched down as she was and rummaging in the mud with both hands, looking for her pebble.  Finding it at last, she glanced over at John and Sherlock, sending them a victorious look, tinged with disbelief at the other girl’s idiocy, before heading over to the water fountain to give her dirty hands and the precious stone a rinse.

“Never,” said John.  He turned to look at Sherlock, his features soft.  “Why do you think Molly brings her to spend time with you?”

“Uncle Sherlock!” called Moira, running over to them with her clean, wet pebble.  “This is for you.  It’s the magical stone of deduction, it can help you with solving cases!”

Sherlock extracted his magnifying glass and accepted the stone.  He turned it in his hands, examining it carefully; scratched at it with a thumbnail, mapping its rough planes and sharp edges.  

There was nothing special about it.  It was a perfectly ordinary chunk of grey limestone gravel, irregular and unremarkable.

Most children probably would have thought it was boring.

Moira didn’t.

“Thank you,” said Sherlock.  He slipped the stone and magnifying glass both into his coat pocket.  “I’ll keep it close,” he promised.

Moira’s face lit up at Sherlock’s approval and she dove at him, her shoulder pressing into his throat as she clasped her short arms too tightly around his neck.

Sherlock held her for a long moment, letting the fierce pressure in his chest intensify, allowing the feedback to reinforce the cue.

He pressed his lips into her hair.

Then, he let her run back to play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big final thankyous go to Megabat, for her incredibly patient and dedicated work as beta; this story wouldn't be half as sleek and shiny without her, nor would I feel a tenth so confident with it. To the commenters who've been with me along the journey, who shaped the story more than they know with the subtle feedback of the things they understood--and the things they didn't--as well as lifting my spirits and keeping me going. And to my husband for the many cups of tea, for picking up the slack and and the toys on the floor, for bathing the children when I was too afraid of Moriarty living in my head, and for making sure I ate and slept occasionally. 
> 
> There may or may not be a couple of other elements in this universe. There’s an outtake that I’m considering, which involves John with his MI5 buddies and Sherlock being Sherlock. Moriarty may horn his way in, because he’s a psycho who wouldn’t properly die if you put a stake through his heart and held a marshmallow roast on his corpse, but we’ll have to see. 
> 
> The more probable follow-up would be a Author’s Commentary version of this story, filled with spoilerific asides about headcanon, subtle points you might not have picked up, plot choices, some of the research or inspiration for things, and a number the writing tricks I’ve used. I read Punk’s Interstitial commentary years ago. I learned a couple of great writing tricks from it, and really enjoyed the insight into someone else’s process, both from things that suited me from it and things that didn’t. I think this story would work well with that, because there's icebergs in here--great mountains shifting below the surface--and I'm incredibly analytical as a writer; I know exactly how I've made this story work.
> 
> If you’re interested in seeing that, do let me know, because starting on a project like that is dangerous for me—my muse doesn’t always understand that it’s too late to have another plotgasm at this point, and it runs the risk that I'll end up wanting to edit the original to have eight more twists or something—and that really shouldn’t sound like a genuine danger, but it is. :P
> 
> I'd love it if you could take a moment to comment on anything that's touched you, if you can. I write to connect, to take an emotion and an experience from my heart and package it up, translate it and distill it until I find its essence, and then to open up the doors and expose it. I avidly read every comment on my stories, even many years later, and those comments are one of the things that brought me back to posting my writing instead of hoarding it all to myself. :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I hope you've enjoyed this particular roller-coaster ride as much as I have.


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